The Red Cloak
by Mengde
Summary: It's been a long time, Vincent Valentine. Things have changed and the world isn't what it once was. You're needed. It's time to wake up.
1. Chapter I

Hello people, it's Mengde again! How y'all doin'? Good to hear. It's been a while since I've written anything of this nature for this section. (By the by, if you're wondering about Loz And Yazoo Are Dead, it's over. Done. I got tired of it. Apologies to those who were reading it and enjoying it.) But y'know, when inspiration strikes...

So yep, let's keep this authornote brief. I'm rating this story T despite some bad language (read: f-bomb), because there won't be any explicit sex or anything else that falls into the mature category, but do beware that this is going to be a bit rougher and more graphic than some of my other stuff. Otherwise, if you like Vincent, Yuffie, Reno, or any combination of the above, read on. I encourage it. Also leave a review if you like what you see. I'll continue writing this as long as I feel like it, but reviews are nice. Let's cut loose!

* * *

Nibelheim, in a dark basement beneath the foundations of the now-elderly Shin-Ra mansion: something slept. 

Fitfully.

**The Red Cloak**

**A Final Fantasy VII Fiction**

**Written by Mengde**

It was a peaceful enough town, Nibelheim, nested beneath the foreboding mountains that loomed to the north. Nothing of import ever happened here, with the exception of a barely-remembered incident that took place years ago. Something about a fire was all one would get if one queried residents of the town.

Being residents was essentially all they'd had to do for a good part of their lives, at this point. The incident was barely remembered because those who were present for it didn't care to recall it, and everyone else was formerly an actor hired by Shin-Ra to populate the town, pretend nothing had happened, and keep the few straggling survivors in line.

Now they were just citizens, same as everyone else. Shin-Ra was dead and gone, less than an unpleasant memory. They had to see to their own survival now that they weren't getting paid for pretending to be long-time members of the town. They couldn't pretend, not now that the lie had become the truth.

That, and the fact that their old bosses were all dead.

So it was a good enough life, certainly. None of them wanted to get caught up in the affairs of the greater world. The citizens of Nibelheim were content to tend to their everyday problems and let the world keep on spinning.

_Sheep._

The thought crossed her mind over and over as she slowly trudged towards the Shin-Ra mansion. People stared at her, the outsider, invading their small sanctum, disrupting their comforting cocoon from the harshness of reality. There are people out there, she was telling them without words, and if there are people, some are bound to be bad.

She kept walking, feeling all of her twenty-six years. She was still young and spry and full of life, but she felt old and wearied whenever she thought of having to deal with the man she was about to meet. He'd been infuriating when they'd met, and that hadn't changed over the years. Sure, she'd been sixteen then, immature and inexperienced, but even a decade later he undoubtedly still had the power to annoy the hell out of her, always had – when he'd bothered to show up.

Their ten-year anniversary, and they hadn't even held a proper meeting. They'd stopped meeting up years ago, as life began to pull them apart. Cid had invited her to Rocket Town for a drink, saying that he thought others might show up. He'd certainly extended the invitation to them.

Nobody else had shown except for Red. Red was studying astronomy, so he had no excuse – the stars weren't going anywhere anytime soon. Everyone else had sent their regrets, saying they were too busy or too far away to make it.

Everyone else except_him_, who hadn't even bothered to reply.

The townsfolk didn't try to stop her as she let herself in through the gate at the front of the mansion and walked up to the entrance, hesitating a moment before pushing open the great doors and stepping over the threshold.

"It's Yuffie," she called. "Anybody home?"

Her voice echoed back at her and she sighed. She could try dialing his cell phone, but he never kept it on. It wasn't like he had a place to plug in the charger for it. The Shin-Ra mansion was dead, its power cut, gloomy during the day and pitch-black at night.

With a small shrug, Yuffie headed up the stairs towards the secret passageway. If he was still sleeping, she'd just have to wake him up.

The stairs spiraling down to beneath the building were long and hard to navigate in the near-darkness. She chewed at her lower lip, examining her options one more time again, but there were no two ways around it, a conclusion she'd arrived at over and over. This wasn't a matter of personal pride any longer; she had to put that aside.

It was pitch-black in the tunnel, and Yuffie pulled out a flashlight, deciding to take the risk of using it. Its beam flooded the tunnel and sent a multitude of bats screeching away, as well as scaring a myriad amount of smaller, crawling things on the floor and walls. Swallowing hard, Yuffie tried not to think about it and instead kept walking until she reached the door.

The door loomed out of the blackness, radiating an aura of menace, and she stood before it for a long time, long enough for the crawling things on the floor to take an interest in her boots, which spurred her on to the lesser of two evils… hopefully. She opened the door, expecting something like a rush of cold air, but nothing overly impressive happened.

Shining the flashlight inside, Yuffie saw a completely empty room except for the single coffin on a table in the middle of it. It was not an opulent coffin, plainly made without embellishment.

Taking a deep breath of the stagnant air, Yuffie crossed the distance in two long strides and rapped on the coffin. "It's Yuffie. Get up, lazy-ass."

Nothing happened. She pounded on the wood, harder, until her knuckles felt ready to split. "I SAID GET UP!"

Again there was nothing, and Yuffie was tired of this. She stuck the flashlight in her mouth, grabbed hold of the lid, and heaved it to the side. It struck the floor with a massive thud, even louder in the near-silence, that scared all the crawling things back again.

In the wavering beam of the flashlight that Yuffie gripped between her teeth was _him_.

He was paler than ever, paler than death itself, and his hair had inexplicably grown during his long sleep, even though he hadn't eaten or drank anything in years. His tattered red cloak was wrapped about his slim form, the golden claws of his gauntlet poking past the edge at one point.

His ruby eyes were open.

He was staring at her.

"You were awake the entire time?" Yuffie asked accusingly as she took the flashlight out of her mouth. "Vincent."

Vincent Valentine sat up, bones cracking, the flesh stretched tight over his now-skeletal frame. He coughed as he expelled year-old air from his lungs and he swung his legs out from the coffin, levering himself into a standing position.

"Yuffie," he croaked, licking cracked lips with an equally dry tongue. "I'm thirsty. Move."

He shouldered past her back out into the tunnel. For a moment he stood poised, listening, and she stared at him, wondering what the hell was going on. Then he struck out with the lightning speed she remembered, catching a bat in his hand.

Yuffie felt her stomach tighten as she realized what he was going to do.

The rodent screeched and bared blood-sucking fangs at Vincent, sinking them into his hand a moment later in a vain attempt to free itself. His expression blank, devoid of pain or irritation at the bite, Vincent snipped the creature's head off with his claws, tipped back, and drank.

He wiped his mouth a minute later and discarded the little cadaver, watching with acute interest as Yuffie heaved in a corner over what had been a light lunch. She finally managed to straighten up and turn around again, staring at him. "I wish you wouldn't do that, Vincent."

"I slept too long," he deadpanned. "A year between breaths, two years since my last drink of water. This will hold me until I can get something proper."

Yuffie shook her head and tried to calm her stomach. "I would've brought you water if I'd known."

"Not a problem. The blood has enough water in it for now and I don't have to worry about pathogens the bat might have had."

Vincent Valentine. Quite a bit less than human.

* * *

It was the first sunlight he'd been exposed to in quite a while. He felt his skin pucker and then flare, absorbing the ultraviolet and converting it to energy. There was quite a lot about his enhanced body that he didn't understand, even after decades of inhabiting it. The effects of his unwelcome guests' habitation in his skull for so many years, not to mention what Hojo had done to make that possible, were probably too variegated and numerous to catalog properly.

Vincent took it in stride. He might be capable of some bizarre form of photosynthesis, but he wasn't a vegetable yet. Give it another ten years, perhaps.

What he wanted right now was water. The little vampire bat's blood had tasted terrible, and while he was sure its water content was enough to sustain him, he wanted to get the aftertaste off of his tongue. The moment that he and Yuffie emerged aboveground, he leapt out a window at the back of the mansion and made his way to the spring in its backyard.

He could feel Yuffie's eyes on him as he knelt at the spring, drinking greedily from it, spitting occasionally to kill the horrid aftertaste. In terms of instant nourishment, the blood was still a sight better than the creepers. Sometimes they stayed alive long enough after being swallowed for him to feel them.

"Done yet?" Yuffie asked pointedly.

Vincent stood, feeling his muscles begin to fill out again and his strength returning as the water rushed through his system. Truly the stuff of life, even for him.

"Much better," he said, unconsciously flicking his cloak a bit to accentuate the words. He turned and looked at Yuffie, who looked back for a moment before becoming unnerved and looking away. "What do you want?"

"You didn't come to AVALANCHE's tenth anniversary," she said.

"That was months ago. If you were angry about my having missed it, you would have come then, not now. Not to mention," and at this he began to pace, circling her, "I very much doubt that anyone else, except perhaps Red XIII, showed up."

His intuition was sharp as ever; he could see the surprise registering on her face. Then she shook her head, angrily, and said, "You're right. That's not why I'm here. Vincent, do you know what's been going on? Do you have any idea what's happening in the world today?"

"I don't care."

That was like a slap in the face to her. She flinched, shocked. "You _don't care? _Vincent, what the hell's wrong with you? Last time I checked, we live on the same planet."

"And when was that?" Vincent asked. "When _did_ you make that check, Yuffie? It seems to me that we live in very different worlds. You should go back to yours." He stopped circling her, instead striding back towards the mansion and the window from where he'd leapt out. "It was good to see you."

"Vinnie," she tried. He stopped, the diminutive hitting him and crawling up his spine. "I didn't come to debate with you."

"Then what?" Vincent demanded, whirling. "Why did you come, Yuffie?"

She visibly steadied herself, summoned up her will. "I came to ask for your help, Vincent."

He gazed inscrutably at her. "You want my help."

"Yes."

Vincent's expression twisted itself horribly, his lip curling and his eyes flashing, head curving back and twitching, and he made a deep noise in his throat. Yuffie watched in mute and somewhat frightened fascination until the display ended with the short and wet sound of him spitting, with perfect accuracy, on the toe of her right boot.

"Fuck off," he said.

Yuffie could do nothing except stare at him, openmouthed in shock, until he was nearly at the window again. Finally she summoned the presence of mind to shout at his back, "I'm not taking 'no' for an answer, you asshole!"

He looked over his shoulder at her, eyes flashing again. "Ask Reno for help," he said, his voice slipping back into its familiar monotone.

"This isn't about Reno, Vincent, it's about you!"

"What _about _me, Yuffie? I've already failed to give you anything he can. There's nothing more to it than that. I'm worthless to you. Now let me sleep. Open my coffin again and I'll throw you out."

Yuffie stared twin daggers into his red-cloaked back as he leaped back through the window into the darkness of the mansion and shut it behind him. He wasn't getting off that easily.

She pulled out her cell and dialed without looking, her fingers knowing the number before she even called it to her mind. Two rings was all it took before Reno picked up. "What's the report, sugar?"

"He told me to fuck off."

A hissing sound; that would be Reno sucking air in through his teeth, an exasperated gesture he was fond of. "Right, guess that's that. You coming home?"

"Not yet. I have an idea."

"Yuffie, if he told you he wasn't helping, there's not an issue left open for debate. You can't do jack about it, you know that."

"We'll see about that, Reno. We'll see." Yuffie eyed the old mansion, analyzing it, laying plans in her head. "You know the old Wutainese saying."

There was a moment of hesitation before Reno realized the path her mind was taking, and then he chuckled and supplied the phrase.

"You can't smoke out a dragon without getting burned."


	2. Chapter II

_She must have been in quite a bind to come to you, Valentine_, the voice inside his head sneered. _Vinnie. That was still enough to stop you in your tracks, wasn't it? Who precisely do you think you're fooling?_

Vincent shook his head and dismissed the insinuations. They were wrong, of course. Yuffie had given up on him a long time ago. There was nothing more for him to give her, so the only reason she would come here to ask him for his help would be to taunt him. It made perfect sense.

_Your logic's off, man. She wouldn't come all the way out here from Wutai just to screw with you. You're being obstinate._

Obstinacy. Vincent felt that he had every right to be obstinate. To call him that just to make him listen to her desperate little plea… It was obscene.

_Any more obscene than what you did to her?_

Vincent snarled to himself and tried to tell the voice to shut up. It hadn't been his fault.

_I'm sure that's precisely why she was so understanding. Maybe if you weren't some kind of fucking freak Reno wouldn't have tried what he did. Maybe all of you would have come out that much better._

Vincent was sure that if he'd been in Reno's position he would have done the same thing. It had just been an accident. Shut up.

_Don't make it into anything but what it is, loser. He deserved it. You took what you wanted and he tried to get in your way. You should have killed him, to say nothing of what you did._

That wasn't the answer. It certainly wouldn't solve anything. Vincent didn't want Reno dead. When he'd told Yuffie that he didn't care, it had been the absolute truth – he'd ceased to care about anything that transpired outside the walls of the mansion, beyond the borders of his coffin, his ultimate refuge. The world was distant and useless to him.

_You better hope nothing violates this nice little cocoon you've built up for yourself, Valentine. Yuffie looked like she was ready to deliver one hell of a wakeup call._

He was tired of the voice and told it to go away. It was a hollow shadow of what Chaos had been, the malignance seeing and hearing everything, criticizing every move Vincent made, making him doubt everything he did. Chaos had made for good conversation while he slept, at the very least; when Chaos had gone, ripped out of him in the aftermath of the Omega Incident, he'd felt empty. So he imagined what Chaos would say in any given situation and took to arguing with himself.

At least, that was what he told himself the voice was.

Still, all he ended up doing was going in circles. Vincent lowered himself back into the coffin, pulling the lid over himself as he did so. He dampened his senses and began to reenter his hibernation. It might take five years or it might take fifty, but eventually his immortal body would atrophy and turn to dust. All he had to do was not drink, not move, not breathe. He'd come out of his hibernation relatively frequently, many years ago, in order to maintain his body; now he saw no reason to.

There was no reason for him to maintain a body whose only purpose was to keep him in a world that was meaningless to him.

Closing his eyes, Vincent slipped into the twilight unconsciousness of pre-hibernation, willing his heart to come to a stop and his breath to slow down to nothing. This would be an acceptable death: returning to dust, forgotten. At this point, he wanted nothing more than that.

For a moment, while conscious thought still remained within his capabilities, Vincent wondered if he should write a note of farewell to be found with his dust, but he quickly discarded the notion. "Forgotten" was hard to come by if there was a note telling who he was and why he'd died.

Vincent slipped past the twilight and into blackness.

* * *

Old Man Yama wasn't called that for no reason. He'd been old for many years; now he was positively ancient. Nibelheim had been his home for as long as he could remember, and that was a ways back.

Still, sometimes he wondered about his memory. Wondered whether or not it might be just a tad suspect. He remembered things that nobody else did, for some reason. Soldiers coming to the town to investigate the Mako reactor. A fire. That horrible silver-haired man disappearing into the flames…

Yama was mute, so it wasn't as though he could share these disturbing images with any of his fellow townsfolk. It was just as well, because he was fairly sure that his fellow townsfolk hadn't really been themselves ever since that night. They'd been replaced almost to a man, but nobody had bothered finding a replacement for Old Man Yama.

He went about his daily business, tending to his garden, selling herbs, occasionally dipping into his rather considerable accounts if the house needed a bit of upkeep. He had little use for money, otherwise; if the children of the town wanted a bit of gil for an afternoon's amusements, they knew they could go to Old Man Yama and ask politely and he'd smile and give them a bit of cash. He liked the children, seeing as how they were genuine citizens of Nibelheim like he was, unlike most of their parents, who hadn't been until just a few years ago.

The young woman who had arrived yesterday had piqued his interest, though. She'd stopped at his herb stand to see what he'd had, even though it was obvious she'd had business with the man in the mansion. Of course Old Man Yama knew about the black-haired man who lived in the mansion. Yama had been twenty-two when the man had first appeared atop the roof, screaming at the sky, before he disappeared back inside.

None of the other townsfolk knew about the man in the mansion, though the children whispered rumors about shadows seen flitting through the mansion during the day, past windows in the corners of their eyes. It was all utter nonsense, of course, since Old Man Yama knew that the man slept in a coffin beneath the foundations of the building. He'd been down there, once, a year after the man had shown himself atop the roof.

"Leave me alone."

Yama respected people's privacy. He'd nodded and smiled and left.

Tonight, though, something happened that took unflappable Old Man Yama by surprise. It was like a night decades past reared its ugly face out of hell and landed square on his doorstep.

Old Man Yama was sleeping when he heard the screaming. He roused himself quickly and padded to the window in slippered feet, wrapping a robe about his aged frame. Outside raged a colossal fire, quickly eating at the Shin-Ra mansion, greedily consuming its old wooden frame.

The volunteer fire brigade was standing by in case the flames tried to spread from the mansion to the town proper, but the fire was contained, and so they were content to watch it, wondering what had happened. Old Man Yama heard talk amongst the crowd of a ruptured gas main, lightning, anything to explain the fire, but he knew it was the young woman. He'd seen her emerge from the mansion yesterday, a grim expression on her youthful features. Obviously she was irritated with the man in the mansion.

A deathly silence fell over the crowd as if on cue, and Old Man Yama shielded his eyes against the blaze to see _him_ emerge from the fire.

He was just as the old man remembered him, save his longer hair and the massive three-barreled pistol he had holstered at his side. His ruby eyes were burning just as brightly as his home, and the firelight skittered over his golden claws as though afraid of being cut.

The man in the mansion had woken up.

Old Man Yama gingerly pushed his way through the crowd and past the fire brigade, all of whom were paralyzed with indecision as to what to do with this stranger. He walked up to the man, smiled, and extended his hand. The ruby eyes bored into Yama's for a long moment, and the old man neither blinked nor looked away, but returned the frightening gaze and continued to smile.

The man's grip was firm as he shook Yama's hand. Taking the opportunity, Old Man Yama turned the man's hand down, palm up, and drew two words there:_welcome back._

* * *

"You have a hell of a lot to answer for, Yuffie," Vincent snarled at her. "I tell you I won't help you and you burn down my home? What is wrong with you?"

He'd been ranting for the past five minutes, something quite unlike him but not unexpected in these circumstances. Yuffie sat on the hotel bed and stared determinedly past Vincent's shoulder until he fell silent, obviously expecting an answer.

"I told you I won't take 'no' for an answer, Vincent," she said icily. "I need your help and I'm not leaving without you. Do you think this was any easier for me than it was for you? Do you know how hard it was to swallow my goddamn pride and ask you pretty-please for your help? I'm the Great Ninja Yuffie, for fuck's sake!"

"You think that excuses what you've done? You've destroyed my place of rest, my_sanctuary_ –"

"Cut the maudlin crap, Vinnie, it's not fooling anyone." She could see, with no small amount of secret delight, the distress that the rebuke caused him. "I burned down a shitty old building. Big deal. Your coffin's beneath its foundations, you coulda stayed where you were. Why'd you come out, Vinnie? Hmm? If you don't care, why'd you come out when I set it on fire?"

"I have memories in that mansion, Yuffie –"

"_What _memories? About how you fucked up and lost the woman you loved and got yourself turned into a monster? Why the _hell_ would you want those memories, Vinnie?"

"They're part of who I am –"

"Who is that, then? Some dick who won't help his old friends? A loser who doesn't care about anything beyond the confines of his coffin? I'd say it's high time to reinvent yourself, Vinnie. You used to care about things, you used to be passionate. I should know, shouldn't I?"

He flinched. "Don't bring that into this. Don't try it."

"I'm not bringing anything in that wasn't involved in the first place. You think I don't know what's made you this way? I was involved, goddammit! Maybe I was as much at fault as you were, maybe even moreso." Impulsively, Yuffie stood and crossed the room to him, grabbing his right hand in both of hers. "I'm long past holding grudges or wishing I'd never met you, Vincent. What's important now is that you're the only person I can turn to – and in the end, isn't that what you couldn't be three years ago?"

She could feel Vincent trembling through the grip she had on his hand. He snatched the appendage away from her a moment later, turning on his heel and seeming to summon up an aura of brooding about himself. "Even if I said yes, Reno…"

"Reno's in on this," Yuffie told him. "You can talk to him right now, if you want. You _know_ Reno's never held any sort of grudge in his entire life. It's not in his nature."

Vincent stared down at his hand, feeling the old man's fingers gingerly tracing the words there. He had no doubt it was the same person as the young man who'd awoken him so many years ago, only to smile and nod when he was rather rudely dismissed.

_Welcome back._

Eight years ago, in the Sleeping Forest. "Can sins ever be forgiven?" Cloud was asking.

"I've never tried," Vincent heard himself say.

A moment of hesitation, Cloud murmuring to himself. He called Marlene to him, gave Vincent an informal salute. "I'm going to go try. I'll tell you how it goes."

"How's Cloud these days?" he asked.

"Busy," Yuffie replied, clearly impatient for a straight answer. "Vincent –"

"I'm going to go try," Vincent said aloud. He turned to look at Yuffie.

"Where are we going?"


	3. Chapter III

"Our first stop is Rocket Town," Yuffie said to Vincent. "Cid'll fly us to Wutai from there."

"What's the situation in Wutai that you need my help with?" Vincent asked, ignoring the chill breeze that swept by as they navigated the mountain range north of Nibelheim.

"Complicated. You remember that whole mess, years ago, about my ill-fated arranged marriage?"

Vincent reached back through the fog of memory to seize hold of the images he was looking for. It hadn't been long after Sephiroth's final defeat – just a couple weeks, as a matter of fact. "The city was in danger from insurgent forces and your father wanted to marry you off to someone or other in order to gather support for the government."

"Mm. Reno didn't see it that way, in the end, so it worked out." Vincent remained silent at the mention of the redhead, and Yuffie sped along to the matter at hand. "Anyway, the situation is kind of the same – the only problem is that these particular insurgents have been popping up everywhere, not just in Wutai. The WRO is having almost as much trouble with them as we are."

Vincent cocked an eyebrow at her as they walked along the path up one of many identical-looking mountains. "And these people are…?"

"The SHM. Silver-Haired Men."

"Some kind of Sephiroth-worshipping cult that's causing trouble? We've had our share of those."

"It started as a cult, sure, and a fairly violent one at that – but it's grown to enormous size because its membership requirements are lax."

"Let me guess," Vincent said none too drily. "'Have silver hair?'"

"Guess you didn't leave your brain in the coffin after all, Vinnie." They reached a long, wooden bridge suspended between two mountainsides, and Yuffie tested it before they stepped onto it and continued walking. "They also like their recruits to wear black leather, but that's kind of a laxer rule there. Nowadays every psycho and bored teenager can join just by dying their hair. It's making for a lot of trouble."

The bridge gave a long, loud creak and Vincent eyed it, stepping a bit more cautiously from there on out. "So they're a troublesome cult whose numbers have swelled. That shouldn't pose a problem."

"It wouldn't, but they've been getting progressively bolder and more violent as they've gained members. Freaks talking about taking back the world for Sephiroth and Mother or something like that."

Vincent flashed back for a moment to the unstable triplets, crouched in the Sleeping Forest while they waited for Cloud to take their bait, muttering about Mother and their Reunion while he watched and listened, hidden, ready to pounce if Cloud faltered.

"Wutai I can understand having trouble dealing with them if they're getting to a certain point," he said. "But the WRO? Last I heard – maybe three years ago – they controlled the entire Eastern Continent plus a good fifty percent of the Middle Continent."

"They've expanded their domain a bit since then," Yuffie explained. "They've got Gongaga now, too, plus Icicle Inn and the other small towns up on the Northern Continent. Cosmo Canyon won't join, though Reeve's been pushing Red to get the government to at least consider a liaison with the WRO. Rocket Town's not going to join, either – Cid likes wielding supreme executive power. Of course, Wutai'll never budge from being independent. Dad's too damn stubborn."

"How large, exactly, are the SHM? I'm trying to get a picture here."

"We estimate about a thousand members in Wutai alone. Throughout all the WRO? Probably seven to eight times that."

Vincent bit at his lip a bit, thinking. "So you want my help rooting them out of Wutai?"

Cursing a bit as she stumbled, Yuffie caught herself and waved away Vincent's proffered hand of support. "It's not as easy as it sounds, Vincent. These guys can basically come out whenever they like and fade back, and the Wusheng can't be vigilant a hundred percent of the time. Reno and I could probably take them out in a few weeks with government support, but… yeah."

That _was_ right. Wanting to kick himself for not remembering, Vincent asked, "Speaking of Reno… how is he holding up?"

Yuffie ducked underneath a low stalactite hanging from the entrance to one of the many labyrinthine cave passages within the mountain. "Fine, I guess. He's had a few years to get used to not being as mobile as he used to be."

"Does he still insist on using that ridiculous walking stick?"

"What, the pink one? No, Dad gave him a new one. Oak. Carved it himself, very nice."

"Good of him." They rounded a bend and Vincent stopped when he saw what lay ahead.

Decrepit, decayed, two stories of rusted metal and piping: the old and dead Nibelheim Mako Reactor. It loomed out from the rock of the mountainside, seeming to be a blot on the sky from the depressed angle at which Vincent viewed it. Yuffie stopped a moment after he did and looked at it, then instinctively glanced about. She'd been traveling with Cloud's party – and Vincent, by then – when they'd reached this stage of their journey, and she had no fond memories here. Fortunately, no Materia Keeper reared its ugly head. The site was as dead as the company that had birthed the reactor.

"What's up, Vinnie?"

Vincent stared at the reactor, working at the inside of his cheek. There was a memory he couldn't quite get at, something about this particular mako reactor…

It had been Cloud that had told him. The circumstances were beyond Vincent at the moment, but what he did remember was what Cloud had said about this reactor and what had happened to him inside it. He'd had a confrontation with Sephiroth, to be sure, but there was something else… something about mako exposure.

"I'm remembering something," he said. "Something Cloud told me about this reactor."

"You have amnesia or something? I couldn't forget what he told me about this reactor if I tried." Yuffie looked at it and made a face. "That whole deal with Sephiroth and Zack… and that _creepy_ bit about the weirdos in the pods…"

It clicked. That was what Vincent was remembering: Cloud's story – anecdote, really – about the poor souls locked in isolation chambers and exposed to massive amounts of mako runoff from the generator's operation in order to study the effects of extended mako exposure.

The discovery that had made Sephiroth go mad.

The bit about the subjects themselves would have been of no particular interest to Vincent if he'd been a normal human being, but he was anything but. He unconsciously flexed the arm inside his gauntlet, remembering how little control he'd had over it if it had been free. Another story for another time, but the point was that he had some vested interest in whatever it was the experiments within the reactor had created.

"I want to go inside," he said.

"What? Why?"

Vincent turned to look at her and gave her the ghost of a smile. "The weirdos in the pods."

She rolled her eyes at him. "Was there ever a point where you weren't irritating, Vinnie?"

He shrugged and started striding towards the reactor. _Vinnie_. She'd fallen right back into using the moniker and he wasn't about to object. It was almost like the old days again, back when they'd first met, except that she'd grown a bit and developed a figure and he'd let his hair grow to his waist out of apathy.

The stairs up to the reactor were badly worn but still usable. Vincent paused at the entrance, frowning. "Yuffie, take a look at this."

"What is it?"

"This door."

The ninja-girl moved forward and looked at the door to the reactor, beginning to frown as Vincent was when she inspected it. Instead of showing the age and neglect of the rest of the reactor, it was in working order – too much of a working order. The hinges were oiled, the latches were all kept clean so as to prevent them from becoming stuck.

Vincent ran a finger down the aforementioned hinges. "This oil job was done just two or three weeks ago. Someone's been here, and more than once – recently, too."

"Someone or someones," Yuffie observed grimly, opening the door and stepping into the blackness, reaching for her flashlight as she did so. "It figures – this is where Shin-Ra was keeping JENOVA, after all. Maybe the SHM consider this holy ground or something."

That would be a sight to see. Vincent pictured a troupe of young men and women with silver-dyed hair making a religious pilgrimage to see the Great and Holy Mako Reactor of Nibelheim. It was enough to make him give a dark chuckle.

He followed Yuffie inside, letting her shine her flashlight about while he felt his pupils grow to unnatural size and his night vision kick in. The best part of it was that Yuffie could shine her flashlight in his face and it wouldn't blind him; he wasn't sure how this selective vision of his worked, only that it did. He was glad enough for that.

Moving deeper into the reactor, they came to their destination: the antechamber to the cocoon-like inner chamber that had once housed JENOVA. There was probably nothing interesting left in the inner chamber, but Vincent and Yuffie found plenty to keep their attention where they were.

The isolation chambers were empty. Split open, exploded, cracked, whatever the case was, all of them had been opened up and had their inhabitant removed… save one.

"You think the SHM did this?" Yuffie asked, shining her flashlight about, not seeing the one untouched chamber off in the corner yet. "Maybe they saw some significance in these things."

"Yuffie," Vincent said, his mouth suddenly dry. "Top right corner. I can see it without the flashlight; you can't. Shine your light there."

Yuffie flicked the flashlight at where he directed and the untouched isolation chamber was caught in the beam like a lost relic unearthed to the light of day. Slowly, Vincent climbed the stairs to its level and then began crossing the catwalk to it.

"I wonder why the SHM didn't open that one," Yuffie thought aloud. "Ideas, Vinnie?"

Vincent peered into the small viewing aperture at the front of the chamber and it became very clear why the SHM had been afraid to touch this one.

Audible even through the metal cocoon, the thing inside screamed as its eyes, or what passed for its eyes, made contact with Vincent's. The sound was a horrible wail, something akin to what Vincent imagined as the cry of a baby born without skin. Yuffie gave a surprised cry and stumbled backwards in fright, only to trip over something on the floor.

She gave another cry when she shined her flashlight on the object, and Vincent whirled to see illuminated in the flashlight's beam a sight straight out of hell. He'd been looking at the isolation chambers, not the floor, so the rational side of him wasn't surprised that he'd missed this, while the other rational side of him that dealt in unadulterated truth told him it had been better when he didn't know the thing was there.

It was what was left of a Silver-Haired Man, or possibly a Silver-Haired Woman – Vincent couldn't tell from the remains. Whatever it had used to be, it had worn black leather and had had all its silver hair ripped out of its scalp and scattered over its gutted and flayed carcass that had crusted to the ground after being half-eaten.

Yuffie made a wretching noise from where she'd fallen next to the corpse, while Vincent was quickly putting two and two together. Perhaps a lone traveler here to see the place JENOVA had been kept for so many years, or perhaps part of a larger group, all of them killed and cannibalized in other parts of the reactor or in the chamber beyond here. Regardless of the scenario, there could only be one perpetrator.

Vincent had just finished piecing together the obvious when said perpetrator popped off the front of its isolation chamber and leaped at him, screaming its horrid cry.

He whirled, half-remembered combat instincts sending his arm to his side, wrapping his fingers around Cerberus, pulling it from his holster.

Too little, too late. The creature was on him, the horrible non-eyes glowing in clusters around its cranium, mouth opening to show a tongue with its own red-stained teeth, its mutated and warped body hitting him like a ton of furred reptilian muscle, the scream resounding in his ultra-sensitive ears…

"VINCENT!"


	4. Chapter IV

"VINCENT!"

Yuffie's cry seemed like it came from miles away. More immediate to Vincent was the nightmare come to life and attacking him.

Its tackle hit him hard, slamming him to the ground before he could get off any shots with Cerberus. The moment he hit and it reared back, he cocked the massive handgun and pumped three-round bursts into the monster's belly. The creature didn't flinch even as blood spurted and sizzled where it struck Vincent's clothing; its head shot back down at him, mouth open, the massive tongue opening at the tip to show the dozens of razor-sharp teeth within.

Briefly, Vincent wondered how it could possibly deploy those teeth. That, however, was before the creature literally turned its tongue inside out and tried to maul him with it.

Vincent jerked his head aside, noting with no amount of dismay how the teeth left marks on the steel catwalk. Then he felt the shooting pain of the thing jabbing him in the gut with a knife fist and animal instinct took over.

His gauntlet came up and broadsided the creature across what served for its face, leaving long, gushing slashes in its faux-flesh. It screeched and tried to hit him with the tongue again – he jerked Cerberus around and fired his last three-round burst into the fleshy appendage, blowing it to bloody shreds – the creature's scream was so hideous it made his teeth rattle – Yuffie was shouting incoherently, he couldn't understand – and the gauntlet moved with fluid grace into a puncturing stab at the creature's throat, burying golden talons deep in its arteries.

That shut up its screeching, though it hammered him in the gut twice more, lightning-fast jackhammer blows that bucked him against the catwalk beneath and blew dents into the metal. Vincent roared and pushed his gauntlet in further, closing it in an iron grip around the thing's spinal cord, and he squeezed.

It didn't like that – it thrashed and tried to get away, but Vincent narrowed his eyes against the black blood spurting everywhere in streams, and bared his teeth, and squeezed. He forced his arm to the side, flexing iron muscle, trying to snap bone that was more like steel cable.

What Yuffie was screaming finally got through to him – "GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM IT, VINCENT, YOU'RE IN THE WAY" – but he was in too deep. He felt the roar ripping at his throat even as he ripped into the enemy's with his claws, it kept beating against his torso with sharp-knuckled fists of stone, its legs were thrashing, and Cerberus was emptied and useless and he started wildly beating it against the adamantine crown of bone that passed for a scalp on the thing. It belatedly occurred to him that he could make much better use of the weapon, so he switched targets to the numerous staring eyes that ringed the horrid head.

These went with a sick popping sound, spewing something other than blood that really hurt with an acidic sting, and the creature thrashed even harder. Vincent ran out of eyes to beat out, so he switched targets again to the side of the thing's head, hoping to amplify the pressure he was putting on its stubborn vertebrae to make it snap. Something shattered and sprayed; the strikes with the butt of his gun stopped making thumping sounds and switched to making squishing ones.

The vertebrae refused to snap.

"Fine, you bastard," Vincent growled, almost unintelligible with animal rage. He pulled his gauntlet out of the front of its throat and kicked the creature off of him with a great heave. Blind, bleeding and perhaps mortally wounded, it still gurgled and sprayed viscous fluid from its throat in what would have been another horrid scream before it charged.

Vincent was ready for the charge. He took it on his feet, whirling around on his heels and catching the thing by the head, tripping it as he did. Its torso tried to keep going forward, powered by its momentum and aided by a helping kick from Vincent as a follow-up to tripping it. The head, being pulled on, tried to go in completely the opposite direction. Still keeping his grip on the grisly thing, Vincent reversed his momentum, kicked off into the air, and delivered a pinpoint kick with the toe of his fearsome boot to the creature's exposed vertebrae.

With a horrid, wet _snap_, the head popped right off.

Vincent managed a landing of sorts, hitting the ground with both feet, though he stumbled and nearly fell before he caught himself. The head, for its part, smacked into a corner of the antechamber, rolled about a bit, and settled.

In the next moment Yuffie was in front of him, shining the flashlight into his face. "Vinnie! Holy shit, are you all right?"

"Far from," Vincent managed before he fell face-forward to the floor.

* * *

The next thing that came to him was her face, directly above his.

Vincent couldn't explain it. Maybe it was disorientation. Maybe it was the strangeness of it all, actually having to come awake from unconsciousness for the first time in a long time. Something in him thought it was years before, and for a moment he favored her with one of his rare genuine smiles.

"That thing hit you over your head, Vinnie?"

That snapped him out of it. It was years after the fact, there was too much between them now, and he hurt all over. "No," he said, "but it's the exception and not the rule."

"Let's go into the mako reactor, Yuffie," she sighed, sitting back. "Let's go and see the weirdos in the pods, Yuffie. What a great idea."

"You were really helpful back there," Vincent coughed, sitting up. They were outside the reactor now, and it was beginning to get dark. "'Get out of the way, you're in the way!' Of what, its fists?"

Yuffie stared at him balefully for a moment before replying, "My boomerang-shuriken. I didn't want to take off that swollen head of yours, thanks."

Quickly, Vincent assessed the extent of the damage. The creature had hit him at various points on his torso at least a dozen times, and the strikes had been hard enough to pulverize concrete. The last time Vincent had had a broken rib it had taken an accident with an industrial crane and a large amount of steel beams, so the creature's blows had been comparatively tame, but this still hurt like hell. It was likely that he had internal bleeding, which mattered little – he reabsorbed his own blood like he was a sponge.

When he tried to flex his fingers, he found he had trouble moving his gauntlet. "Great," he muttered, looking at it. The acidic blood pouring over it had congealed into some kind of thick, gooey substance that was only partially elastic. "How are we going to get this off?"

By way of reply, Yuffie produced a materia that she'd had bonded with herself: a moment's concentration was all it took for Vincent to determine that it was a Fire materia. He grimaced at what she was suggesting, but nodded for her to proceed.

Fifteen rather agonizing minutes later, Vincent was minus the congealed blood and owner of a large amount of third-degree burns on his arm, which normally took an hour or two to crust over and then heal. "Well done," he said. "I barely felt the searing pain at all."

"Bite me." Yuffie stood up and dusted herself off, returning the Fire materia to where she had it bonded with her arm. "So that was a nice detour, eh?"

"An informative detour, I'd say," Vincent countered. "The Silver-Haired Men obviously have some sort of interest in this reactor – to be more specific, its former inhabitants. They must be the ones that took the rest of the subjects, there's no other explanation."

"You stop to consider that the subjects might have broken out of _their_ isolation chambers and gone out roaming? The mountain could be crawling with them."

"I doubt it. That corpse you tripped over was fresh, only a week old at most. It wasn't in an advanced enough state of decay to be older. I'm thinking the SHM took the rest of the subjects and happened to get to our friend last due to its placement. They obviously weren't expecting it to wake up when they popped the seal."

"That leads us back to the question of _why_ the SHM would take these freaks."

"Curiosity, maybe. Maybe the fanatics at the top see these things as long-lost relatives or demigods due to their sharing close proximity with JENOVA for so long. After years and years of being in an unpowered reactor, I doubt they expected any of them to still be alive."

"Well, we can ask Cid to take a look when we get to Rocket Town," Yuffie said, stretching a bit. "Here, catch."

She lobbed something at him. Vincent caught it out of the air and realized a moment later she'd picked up the head. It was in sorry shape, still dripping bits of blood and other fluids he'd rather not think about. In the evening light it was even more hideous, the blasted tongue lolling horribly out of its maw, what was left of its eyes looking like popped blisters set into its bluish-green flesh.

"Yuffie," Vincent said calmly. "Why."

"I thought it'd be a nice souvenir. Maybe we can get it shrunk."

"Not amusing, Yuffie."

She made a face at him. "Cid has a whole lab now full of useless crap that he always goes out of his way to find an excuse to use. I figure this is probably the first thing he'll ever have the pleasure of making a useful analysis on."

"Bravo to that," Vincent groaned, holding the head at arm's length. Now that he had an opportunity to study it, he noted that it also had the most wonderful smell in the world, something that defied description beyond the fact that it made him want to throw up. "So why do I have to carry it?"

Yuffie looked innocently at him. "You don't expect a delicate flower like me to carry something as ugly as that, do you, Vinnie?"

By way of reply he tossed the head back at her. "Your idea, your baggage. All I did was kill the thing."

She caught it and stuck her tongue out at him before pulling her boomerang-shuriken from her back and sticking the head on one of the prongs. "Let's just hope it dries out. This really stinks."

It occurred to Vincent to reload Cerberus, so he did that and also checked the weapon for damage while Yuffie went on a rant about how horrible the head smelled. He listened with half an ear, catching graphic bits that he let slip in one ear and out the other lest his imagination pursue the imagery she suggested.

"…kind of musky, but not in a good way – like that zombie dragon we fought in the north cave. You remember that, Vinnie? Vinnie? Are you listening?"

"No," he said brusquely, completing the check of his gun and replacing it in his holster. Its grip was also coated in the same disgusting substance that had covered his gauntlet, but he wasn't about to ask Yuffie to burn it off. That would produce explosive and quite possibly unpleasant results. "Let's go."

* * *

Lex lowered his rifle as the black-haired man and his petite companion rounded a bend in the mountain path and disappeared. They hadn't noticed him or his partner watching them, which was fortuitous, because Lex was uninterested in unnecessary confrontations, regardless of how bloodthirsty all the indolent newcomers might be.

"Aibo," he said. "Let's go."

Aibo nodded and followed Lex's lead out of the niche they'd been hiding in. The man didn't have a proper name, or at least didn't remember it, so Lex had dubbed him Aibo when they'd been partnered. He also didn't talk; Lex was fairly sure that he was mute.

It was fine. They worked well together, and that was all that mattered.

The reactor was a mess. Their flashlights revealed years of neglect and disuse everywhere, even though the Silver-Haired Men had been making steady trips here until just eight days ago when the last dispatch failed to report back in. The teams could at least have made some effort to restore the hallowed site to the picture of working order.

The antechamber to JENOVA's Sanctuary was where Lex and Aibo found what was left of the last team – a bloody, torn-up corpse. There was no sign of the other three members; something must have eaten them completely. A local monster, no doubt, scavenging for food inside the reactor.

"Just like Command suspected," Lex sighed. "What a pain, eh, Aibo? You'd think they'd stop sending us on milk runs like these."

Aibo didn't reply, obviously, but he did tap his knuckles twice on something higher up in the room, his sign for "come here." Lex frowned and ascended the stairs to see what Aibo was shining his flashlight on.

He had to suppress a whistle after he saw what it was. From the bullet holes and the way the head had been ripped off, Lex had to conclude that the black-haired man had done this himself. No wonder the last team hadn't reported in; this thing had had them for dinner.

"Set up the signaler outside and get me Command," Lex told Aibo. "Tell them we have answers. Answers, and more questions to go with them."


	5. Chapter V

Another day of walking brought them to their destination at twilight. Vincent had pressed on, keeping a steady pace, while Yuffie had irritatedly kept up and complained about how badly the head smelled. For his part, Vincent had made sure he was always upwind from her.

Rocket Town was unchanged from the last time he had seen it. The old rocket tower had been taken apart years ago and replaced with an airship field that stretched for a good quarter mile in all directions out from the town, making Rocket Town a central refueling hub for air trade. The town made a good bit of profit off of all the fliers that made port, because where there were pilots, there was a demand for entertainment and alcohol.

Vincent and Yuffie descended the slope they were on and reached the outskirts of town relatively quickly. A bored guard struggled to his feet from where he sat and came out to meet them. "Purpose of your visit to Rocket Town?" he asked, his tone suggesting he wished he was anywhere but here.

"We're here to see Cid," Vincent said.

"The Captain?" the guard asked. "You friends of his?"

"Yep," Yuffie said. "Now let us in, 'kay?"

There was a moment of silence, and then the man's nose wrinkled. "What the hell is that… that _smell?_"

Yuffie's answer came in the form of pulling her boomerang-shuriken off of her back and shoving the head in the man's face. "Like it? I thought I'd bring something to show the kids."

His response was to stagger away, face turning a pale shade of green. The sound of him evacuating his stomach was very loud in the relative quiet of the town's fringes.

Vincent waited a full five minutes of walking into the town before he asked, "Kids?"

"I was joking, Vinnie. No need to get so uptight."

He nodded and picked up the pace a bit, not wanting her to see how the suggestion had bothered him. Of course it was nothing to him if she and Reno had had children by this time. He was past the whole business; they were just old friends now.

_That's what you tell yourself, anyway._

Vincent cut the voice off before it could go further. He wasn't in the mood to argue with himself.

The town became decidedly more active as they got to its center, with bars open everywhere, people parading drunkenly through the streets, and young people chasing each other or trying to find a secluded corner, depending on how old they were. The general mood was one of festivity and goodwill, and Yuffie immediately perked up and forgot about the somewhat miserable trip.

The house was right where he remembered it, even though the town had expanded exponentially in the years he'd been away. There was a light on inside, so Vincent rapped on the door five times and then stepped back a pace expectantly.

Someone bellowed something thankfully incoherent from inside and pounding footsteps came towards the door like an approaching thunderstorm. It flung open and would have smacked Vincent if he hadn't taken the step back, remembering that the house's owner had purposefully constructed an outwards-opening front door out of general spite.

Backlit by the light streaming from inside the house, Cid Highwind stared thunderously at Vincent and Yuffie. "HAVE YOU NOT HEARD OF LETTING A MAN HAVE TEA WITH HIS GODDAMN WIFE?"

"Good to see you, too, Cid," Yuffie snerked. "I brought an old friend."

Cid's penetrating gaze snapped from Yuffie to Vincent, and he stared slackjawed for a moment before recovering his normal composure. "Well, well. Never thought I'd see your sorry ass again, Valentine." He took a half-step forward, jaw clenching. "Ever hear of a little thing called reypondey, seal-voos-plate?"

Yuffie rolled her eyes. "It's répondez, s'il vous plait. And you made out all the tenth anniversary invitations as regrets only."

"I was testing you," Cid deadpanned. "Damn straight I made 'em regrets only. And d'you know what you're supposed to _do_ when an invitation's regrets only, Valentine?"

"Reply only if you're not coming," Vincent matched Cid's deadpan.

"'Zactly. Now I'd like to know – if you weren't here, why the hell didn't I at least get a, 'Sorry, can't come, too busy being a self-pityin' little _prick_ to show?'"

"Cid!" Yuffie interrupted. "Enough. Sure Vinnie's not much for courtesy, but he's sorry. Aren't you, Vinnie?"

Vincent stared at her and then looked back at Cid, whose gaze could doubtlessly blow incoming missiles out of the air.

"Yes," he said. "Apologies, Cid."

For a moment Cid looked as though he wasn't about to buy it; then he deflated and gave a little shrug. "Whatever. I figure that's the best I'll get out of ya. Come on in, don't stand around outside like a dumbass."

Vincent and Yuffie exchanged glances and followed Cid inside. Vincent opened his mouth to ask after Shera, but Cid beat him to it. "SHERA! WE GOT GUESTS! MAKE 'EM SOME GODDAMN TEA, THEY'RE THIRSTY!"

They came to the living room, where Shera was already up and smoothing out her nightgown. "Vincent, Yuffie," she said, an affectionate twinkle in her eyes. "Good to see the both of you again."

"The same," Vincent said.

"Would you like some tea?" she asked, acting as though Cid hadn't just bellowed at her that they did. Obviously she knew it was just another one of his unwarranted assumptions.

"Load it down with sugar, please," Yuffie said with a grin. Vincent nodded his thanks as well, and Shera moved into the kitchen while Cid collapsed into his armchair and motioned for the two of them to sit.

"Now then," Cid said. "Mind explaining what the hell smells so bad?"

Yuffie pulled the head off of her boomerang-shuriken. "This. We got it off of some freak in the Nibelheim Mako Reactor."

Cid wrinkled his nose at it. "You mean one of those freaks in the isolation chambers that Cloud told us about?"

"The same. This was the only one left, and apparently the only one alive. All the others had been taken – we're thinking by SHM, since this one's last meal had silver hair."

The old pilot snorted. "Didn't think any of those things would be alive. What do you want with it?"

"Just an analysis. Maybe you could work up some kind of scanner that would tell us if stuff like it was around. It could help us track down the SHM's bases of operation if they keep these things in cryo storage there."

"Sure, sure." Cid leaned towards the kitchen and yelled, "SHERA! GET AN ICEBOX, TOO!"

"Get it yourself, you old fart," Yuffie said. "She's making tea."

Cid muttered something questioning Yuffie's heritage and personal hygiene, but got up and dragged an icebox in from the kitchen a minute later. Yuffie stuck the head inside and they sealed it tightly.

"That should hold it 'till I get around to lookin' at it," Cid said, sitting back down and resting his feet up on the icebox. "Looks awful beat up, though. You do that, Valentine?"

Vincent pulled Cerberus out of its holster – safety on, of course – and tossed it to Cid. He caught the weapon out of the air and made a face when he saw the congealed substance on the butt of the gun. "Nasty." He threw it back and Vincent caught it and twirled it around his finger back into its holster. "Musta given you quite a fight."

"Quite a fright, more like," Yuffie said. "Especially when I tripped over what was left of its dinner."

Cid guffawed at that and reached into his pocket, pulling out a packet of gum. He took a strip and popped it in his mouth, chewing contentedly.

"I don't remember you chewing gum," Vincent observed.

"Shera made me quit smoking," Cid growled. "Said she was tired of kissin' an ashtray or some bullcrap like that. The gum helps keep me sane." He lifted up a sleeve of his bedrobe to show a pair of patches on his biceps. "These help too."

Shera returned with the tea, handing a cup and saucer to Vincent, who accepted with another nod of thanks. It was much better than plain water, and it beat the bat blood by an incredible margin.

Yuffie took a sip of her own tea and sighed. "That really hits the spot. Thanks, Shera."

"No problem." The scientist took a seat next to Cid and resumed sipping her own tea. "How long has it been, Vincent?"

"Three years, I think," Vincent replied. "Maybe more."

"Did you find what you were looking for?"

Of course Shera would take his retreat from AVALANCHE and the rest of the world as some kind of quest for enlightenment and not a withdrawal from everything that disgusted and mortified him. "You might say that."

"Super," Cid exclaimed. "So. When d'you want me to fly you over to Wutai, Yuffie?"

"I'd say day after tomorrow, Cid. Give us a little time to rest and see the sights, y'know?" Vincent noted how the old pilot preened when Yuffie insinuated that there were sights to be seen in his town besides airships and their drunk pilots.

"Sounds like a plan, kid. How's Reno doin'?"

Yuffie winced a little at the question, her eyes instinctively flicking to Vincent to see if he reacted at all. For his part, he pretended not to notice, sipping his tea and staring implacably at the wall. "He's doing fine, thanks."

"I actually got a little somethin' for him that I've been workin' on for a while," Cid said, leaning forward a bit, his eyes flashing with excitement. "I think he might really like it."

"Sounds great, Cid. Have you talked to Cloud recently?"

Cid's lip curled. "No. I haven't talked to WRO Poster Boy in more than a year, unless you count that great reply he sent to my invitation. 'Busy. Fuck off. Love, Cloud.'"

"He did _not _say that," Shera chided her husband. "You know how the WRO keeps him occupied."

"Keeps him on a short leash, more like. Sometimes I wonder what the hell Reeve's thinkin'."

"You know his only intent is to build a peaceful world government to preserve the Planet, Cid."

"An' anyone who gets in his way gets to deal with Cloud," Cid sighed. "Kinda makes you think."

"Cloud's only interested in protecting people," Shera continued insisting calmly. "It's just that this way he can get rewarded properly for doing that."

"I'm not buyin' any of it. If the kid wants so badly to stick his nose in other people's business, who'm I to say anything? But there's a difference 'tween protectin' people and becomin' the WRO's trashman."

Vincent's lip twitched. He'd been the Turks' trashman, decades ago. Somehow he doubted that Cloud would be quite as dispassionate about taking out bodies. "You're not serious, Cid."

"Damn straight I am. They set him loose solo on this crowd of about two hundred SHM that were stirrin' shit up in Edge, right? Wanted to make an example of 'em. Seventy of 'em ended up in the hospital. Two of 'em damn near died, and they weren't even out of their teens."

"Cloud was holding back," Vincent said decisively. "If he had given it his all, if the crowd had been genuinely dangerous or had lethal intent, I have no doubt that all two hundred would have ended up dead."

That was enough to bring a hushed silence on their company for a few minutes while Cid chewed his gum and the rest of them sipped their tea. Finally Yuffie broke the silence, saying, "I'm pretty bushed – I think I'll turn in. Could you show me the guestroom, Shera?"

"Certainly," Shera replied. "Vincent, would you like to share the room with Yuffie?"

"I'll sleep on the roof," Vincent replied brusquely. "Thank you, though."

Shera gave a small, worried frown, but didn't object or try to argue the point. She simply set her tea down and motioned for Yuffie to follow. The ninja-girl stood up, waved goodnight to Vincent, and patted Cid on the shoulder as she passed. The two women exited the room a moment later, leaving Cid and Vincent alone.

"So," Cid said. "Feel good to be out and about again, Valentine?"

Vincent neither confirmed nor denied the supposition, but merely sipped his tea again.

"Thought as much," the old pilot sighed. "You might not be able to tell, bein' thick like you are, but I can tell the kid's really happy to see you again." He got up and shouldered the icebox with its grisly contents. "It's good to see you again, Vincent. Take a pillow if you can't get comfy on the roof." That said, he disappeared into the kitchen and was gone.

Vincent finished his tea. He went into the kitchen, finding it deserted, and cleaned the cup and its saucer before replacing it in the cabinet. He'd always been a proper guest, after all. Then he silently wished the house a good rest; he'd have no sleep tonight. He'd been sleeping for two years, and he had lost time to make up for.

Moving soundlessly to the front door, Vincent let himself out. It was time to hunt some Silver-Haired Men.


	6. Chapter VI

Rocket Town was relatively small compared to Wutai, so Vincent didn't expect that there would be very many SHM within its boundaries. Still, any good cult would try to establish roots wherever it could, and he knew he would be able to find a member or two by the end of the night.

An hour's worth of rooftop-hopping produced nothing, but Vincent was far from finished. The later it got, the greater became the chances of his quarry making themselves visible and becoming foolishly bold. Night rats always got more stupid as it got darker.

At one point he heard a scuffle in an alley a ways off and rushed to get there, thinking this might be the ticket, but it was just a pair of drunken pilots having a go at one another. He watched them throw lefts and rights at air, staggering around so much they couldn't possibly hit anything. Eventually Vincent got tired of it, so he jumped down into the alley, grabbed both men, and banged their heads together, hard. He left, assured that they would wake the next morning with a new appreciation for the meaning of the word "migraine."

It took until nearly midnight, but Vincent had years' worth of rest stored up in his body and he wouldn't need to sleep for weeks at this slow rate. There were three of them, stalking through half-lit streets and generally acting as if they owned the by-now empty town.

Vincent studied them. The one in the lead, a boy, couldn't have been older than seventeen. He wore his hair short and sported a black leather jacket, though that was the limit of his uniform observance. The next oldest was a girl, sixteen, probably the leader's girlfriend. She also wore her hair short, cropped to the shoulders, and had a matching leather jacket. The third was another boy, only twelve or thirteen, undoubtedly the leader's brother who was following him because it was the cool thing to do.

Deciding to make a dramatic entrance, Vincent waited until they turned a corner in the street. He dropped down in front of them, cloak a billowing cloud of red, eyes flashing, right hand on his gun and left hand with its golden talons splayed.

The youngest one panicked, turned, and ran, screaming. His brother proved rather harder to scare, though he did back up a step before he snarled and reached into his jacket for something, probably a knife.

Vincent raised an eyebrow in surprise when the kid drew a nine-millimeter pistol instead and leveled it at him. His gauntlet blurred and suddenly the pistol was flying out of the boy's hand in pieces. "Shouldn't point guns at people," Vincent smirked.

His smirk vanished when the girl _also_ pulled a nine-millimeter, her eyes wild, and fired a shot into his gut. It didn't hurt all that much compared to the mako creature hitting him over and over, but he was still a bit sore, so it irritated him. His boot flashed and the gun spiraled out of the girl's grip, its muzzle crushed.

"Aim for the head," Vincent told her, "and don't stop shooting until the target stops moving."

She screamed and ran after the leader's brother, while the leader himself angrily stood his ground, pulling out a knife from one of his boots.

"Violent," Vincent observed. "Too violent."

The boy roared and lunged. Vincent sidestepped easily and played with the boy for a few minutes, reading the ineffectual knife strikes miles away, so badly were they choreographed. He'd been trained up to expert level in knife-fighting as a Turk; this kid had no idea how to use the implement to its full potential.

Finally, Vincent tired of the game and caught the knife between two talons, ripped it away from the boy, and snipped it in half. "Now I have some questions, if you don't mind." He wasn't surprised when the boy started to flee, so he easily kept pace alongside him. "There's no point. I'm faster, stronger, and more skilled than you are. I could very easily kill you in a second. Be cooperative and that won't be a problem."

All that did was make the boy redouble his pace, so Vincent matched his speed again. The boy's breathing began to get ragged; Vincent doubted the kid could do this for more than another five minutes before he collapsed. It would be infinitely easier to just beat the knowledge out of him, but the boy _was_ only seventeen or so – Vincent was efficient, but not cruel.

Of course, maybe the boy had more stamina than Vincent allotted him, in which case he could very well flee back to the SHM's base of operations within Rocket Town and lead Vincent right to it. The alternative was fleeing back to his house and explaining to his parents what he was doing out so late and why there was a frightening, cloaked man following him.

His earlier guess proved correct, however. As the boy's breaths began to come in strained drags, he tripped and hit the dirt face-first, skidding a bit before coming to a halt. He tried to raise himself up but collapsed again, utterly exhausted.

"Finally got that out of your system?" Vincent asked. "Good. Now answer my questions."

"F-fuck off!" the kid tried.

Vincent narrowed his eyes and picked the boy up by his collar, raising him until his feet dangled inches above the ground. "I've been nice to you so far, kid. Keep this up and it might get painful for you."

That, plus one look at Vincent's gauntlet, was enough to make the boy whimper and start sobbing for mercy. Disgusted but pleased that he'd broken his quarry without excessive force, Vincent dropped him and said, "All right, stop crying. Who were those two with you?"

"M-my brother and my g-girlfriend," the boy managed to get out.

"Your brother was smart," Vincent hissed. "Not _that_ smart – he still let you convince him to join up with the SHM – but smart enough to know when he's completely outmatched." He tapped his gut where the bullet had hit him, the wound already healed up and the bullet being metabolized by his body. "Your girlfriend is a lousy shot, though. You should tell her not to pick up a gun unless she's committed to putting a bullet between somebody's eyes."

"P-please," the boy stuttered, the word obviously unfamiliar to him. "Just lemme go, right?"

"SHUT UP!" Vincent snarled. _Put the fear of death into the little shit, Valentine,_ the voice said, and he was in complete agreement. There had been need for a reminder of who was in charge, here. The boy flinched and covered himself with his arms, and Vincent let him stew for a bit before continuing. "Funny about those guns, though. Unless your parents happen to have an arsenal at home, how could you have gotten them? Neither of you are old enough to buy firearms yet. So – _do_ your parents keep guns at home?"

"N-n-n-n-"

"STOP STUTTERING!" Vincent thundered.

"NO!" the boy screeched almost involuntarily.

"Just like I thought. So where _did_ you and your girlfriend get those weapons, kid? Did your bosses in the SHM give them out to you?"

"Yeah." The boy's face was pale, but he'd mastered some amount of control over himself by this point. "Part of why I joined. You get a gun when you join up if you're old enough. My bro isn't old enough, though, it's why only me and Julie had them."

Vincent nodded. "How many of you are there in this town?"

"I dunno. The last time we met, maybe four hundred?"

Interesting. "Is this join-and-you-get-a-gun deal in place everywhere the SHM operate?" Vincent demanded.

"I never been outside Rocket Town, man. I don't know."

"Supposing it is, explain to me how the SHM hope to give every single malcontent and teenager who joins a gun? There are a thousand of them at least in Wutai, probably thousands more throughout the WRO. No third-rate cult is going to have the means to supply what amounts to an army."

"I don't know about any of this shit, man. I just joined up 'cause I was bored and I wanted a gun."

"Fine. And where do all of you congregate when you meet?"

The boy gave him an address; Vincent memorized it and resolved to ask Cid about it in the morning. That was all he needed at this point, but he moved in closer, crouched in front of the kid. "What's your name?"

The blood drained even further from his face, but the boy replied, "Mike."

"Fine, then. Mike." Vincent pulled Cerberus from his holster and put it in the boy's hand. Mike didn't even notice the congealed blood on the butt of the gun; he stared, wide-eyed, at the massive weapon, visibly making an effort to hold it up. It was, after all, extremely heavy. "If you want a gun that badly, I'll give you this one. All you have to do is shoot me in the face at point-blank range."

Mike stared at him. "Are you fucking crazy? I'm not gonna do that."

Vincent smirked and took Cerberus back. "Then why would you want a gun?"

He crouched and leaped up to a nearby rooftop, hopefully leaving the SHM with one less member.

* * *

"You did _what_, you son of a bitch?" Cid exclaimed over breakfast.

Vincent narrowed his eyes at the old pilot. "I didn't feel like sleeping." Yuffie snorted through a mouthful of bagel and almost choked, but managed to swallow and keep breathing.

Eyeing the ninja-girl like she might reach across the table and devour his scrambled eggs, Cid blew out a sigh and leveled his fork accusatively at Vincent. "You shouldn't go around scarin' the shit out of kids, Valentine. Even if they did give you good info on the SHM's operations here."

"I think Vincent did the proper thing," Shera countered placidly. "He was right to question them and righter not to hurt them."

"I wish I coulda seen their faces," Yuffie sighed.

Vincent resisted the urge to roll his eyes at her. "The boy, Mike, was very informative. He gave me an address – maybe you know where it is, Cid." He passed a slip of paper across the table to him.

The old pilot snatched it up. "'Course I know where it is. It's only my goddamn city, after all." He looked at what Vincent had written and frowned. "What the hell?"

"Don't know where it is, old man?" Yuffie asked.

"Far from it. I know exactly where this is, it's just that I wouldn't expect the SHM to be using it for meetings."

"Why not?"

"Because, Princess, this is smack-dab underneath the airfield." Cid grinned insolently at Yuffie's angry reaction to the nickname, while Vincent recalled all the times she'd told him how much she hated being royalty. "It's hangar zero, where we keep any airships that we impound."

"And how many airships do you have impounded right now?" Vincent asked.

"Zip, zero, none. The only time I take a fellow's airship away from him is if he commits a crime in my city. I don't care what people's cargoes are, innocuous or otherwise. Free trade means free trade – let the WRO bust their asses watching out for contraband. I don't give two shits."

"And the crime rate is so low because…?"

Cid laughed. "Nobody wants their airship impounded, an' all that pilots come into the city for is to get drunk."

"Effective." Vincent took another sip of orange juice and then continued, "But how could the SHM be getting into hangar zero? A security breach?"

"Not a breach in the sense that there's some way into it that isn't protected, no. If they're gettin' in there, it's because one of the airfield staff is a SHM sympathizer or even a member. An' if that's true, I'll kill the bastard myself when I find him."

"Or Mike might have been lying to you," Shera suggested.

Vincent gave her a thin smile. "Tell me five things about yourself, four of them true."

"I worked as a rocket engineer for twelve years before I met Cid, my favorite kind of tea is black, I was born in Kalm, I speak excellent Gongagan, and I got my airship piloting license last year."

"What _is_ your favorite kind of tea, then?" he asked.

She stared at him for a moment before replying, "Green. How –"

"He was a Turk," Yuffie explained. "You can't lie to him."

"Second rule of detecting a lie," Vincent said. "Know that the subject is going to tell you one."

"And the first rule?" Shera asked.

Vincent smiled at her again. "Ask them to tell it to you."


	7. Chapter VII

In retrospect, it was obvious how the breach in airfield security had been getting away with letting the SHM meet in hangar zero. Silver hair was a dead giveaway, but it was a requirement for membership, and so any would-be infiltrator's situation was seemingly intractable – "seemingly" being the key word.

Vincent, as soon as Cid had asked him to investigate, had taken the direct approach. He lined up every single airfield employee who had an access level high enough to permit entry to hangar zero, and made them stand out on the airfield in the blazing afternoon heat. All of them were wearing identical, long-sleeved khaki uniforms with caps, and all of them looked extremely uncomfortable.

For his part, Vincent seemed not to notice the heat. He strolled up and down the line of men and women several times while Yuffie watched as she rested on a deck chair beneath a parasol. No reason _she_ couldn't be comfortable.

"HATS OFF!" he bellowed suddenly. All of the employees jerked with surprise but reacted quickly enough, pulling off their caps and exposing their hair. Blond, brown, black, red, and every variation therein, along with some obviously artificial colors like pink and blue, glistened in the sun, but there was no silver to be seen.

Vincent surveyed them all again and then yelled, "HATS BACK ON!" The employees complied and he continued. "All right. I don't know if you ladies and gentlemen have been informed, but we have a security breach here – someone is working with the SHM. All of you are going to stand here until the infiltrator reveals him- or herself. When you start dying of dehydration I'll consider alternative methods of finding our friend's identity."

Protests were obviously raised, and Vincent pulled Cerberus and fired once into the paving beneath his feet, the triple rounds blowing chips of hot concrete. "Anyone who wants to talk back can do so into the barrel of my gun. I want silence from here on out."

So they waited, and waited, and waited, and obviously nothing happened. Yuffie continued to watch from beneath her parasol, occasionally glancing at her wristwatch out of boredom and resisting the urge to call Reno. She hadn't talked to him since before she'd gotten Vincent to see things her way and she missed him, but distractions were not what she – or Vincent – needed right now.

An hour passed and Vincent continued to pace up and down the line of people, totally unaffected by the heat. All of the employees were sweating heavily by now, some of them panting. Vincent exchanged a look with Yuffie, and she felt a smile tug at her lips when he did that. That was his secret look, his satisfied look, and it had been a long time since she'd seen it.

"HATS OFF AGAIN!" Vincent roared.

Their reactions were slowed by the heat, but the employees complied again. Vincent made another full two circuits around the line, staring at each employee's hair in turn. Finally he stopped in front of one and stared, his expression malevolent.

This particular employee was a young man by the name of Terrence. He looked to be around twenty, lean build, features that might have been good-looking if they weren't contorted into an unpleasant scowl. "What?" he asked.

Vincent eyed his hair, curly locks of blond. "Nice hair," he said.

"Thanks?" Terrence asked, unsure what to say.

"Too bad it's fake."

Terrence started like he'd been hit with a live power line. "W-what? My hair's not fake, you're crazy!"

"Take it off," Vincent said. "Now."

"I can't take it off, it's not f-"

Terrence's protestation was interrupted when Vincent pulled Cerberus and shoved it in the young man's mouth. "Don't bother trying to lie to me," Vincent hissed. "Remove that, now, or I'll figure out how after I've blown the lower part of your head off."

With something that might have passed for a pathetic squeak, Terrence assented. He reached his hands up to the back of his head, pulled on something, and then the blond locks peeled away with the concealed skullcap to reveal short silver hair resting beneath.

"Good," Vincent said, then raised his voice. "The rest of you are free to go. There's water waiting for you inside the control tower and you'll all receive a bonus to make up for your discomfiture. Thank you for your cooperation."

It was like a lead blanket had been lifted off the shoulders of the employees – all of them stood straight up and sprang into motion, rushing for the control tower, already abuzz with delighted talk of the rather-hefty bonus that Vincent had squeezed out of Cid. Within five seconds, Vincent and Yuffie were alone with Terrence.

Scowling, Vincent pulled Cerberus out of Terrence's mouth and wiped its barrels across the young man's shirt. "Now then, Terrence. I have just a few questions for you."

Terrified, Terrence stuttered, "H-how? That skullcap-wig is a pro-level disguise. I was told it came from Turk storage."

"Funny thing about skullcaps, Terrence, is that they don't sweat," Vincent said. "You think I had everyone come out here and stand around with their hats on for fun? Your hair was the only one that wasn't dampened down with perspiration after an hour of this. Or perhaps you would have liked me to go around shaving people's heads or jerking their hair to see if they felt it?"

"Look, man, please don't hurt me. M-maybe we can make a deal?"

Vincent looked over his shoulder at Yuffie and showed a bit of teeth. "A deal, he says. What do you think, Yuffie?"

Yuffie stood and stretched languorously before saying, "I dunno, Vinnie. Let's hear his offer, eh?"

"I can get you the entire SHM contingent here in Rocket Town," Terrence immediately said, obviously desperate to save his own skin. "Junior members, leadership, everyone. All at once. What d'you say, huh?"

Vincent locked gazes with the young man, who almost immediately looked away. "It's not that simple, is it?" Vincent asked softly, his tone dangerous. "It's not up to you. You're just the sneak, the one who makes it possible. It's not as though you can give us the gang here on a platter at any time you choose."

"Well, no, but –"

"Then you're really of no use to us," Vincent sighed. "I think we'll just go ahead and kill you, then."

All the blood drained out of Terrence's face and he fell to his knees in tears. A minute of incoherent and uninteresting begging followed, while Vincent pretended to look contemplative and Yuffie tried to keep a straight face as Terrence wept all over Vincent's boots.

Finally Vincent got tired of putting up the act and raised Terrence's head up, putting one of his pointed boot toes beneath the young man's chin. "Fine, shut up. Since you're so eager to live, you'll tell us exactly how we _can_ get the SHM here on a platter."

"Of course of course of course of course of course!" the sneak sobbed.

"Good," Vincent said. "Oh, and a word of advice." He bent low and grabbed Terrence by the jaw, wrenching his gaze up to meet his own. "For your sake, you'd better make yourself indispensable to the plan. You'll live longer that way."

In three minutes, Terrence had spilled everything they wanted to know.

* * *

The plan required their waiting two days, but in the end Terrence's word proved to be worth at least something. Right on time, an unmarked airship arrived and paid the docking toll for a two-day stay. The pilot was a nobody, someone from the Eastern Continent who was employed by Lockhart Shipping Industries. His assignment was simply to pilot the airship here and pilot it back two days later – he neither knew nor cared what the cargo was.

This would normally have been viewed as aberrant or suspicious in any other port, but in Rocket Town, the pilot wasn't the only one who neither knew nor cared what his cargo was. When Cid said free trade, he meant it – all sorts of shifty deals went on in Rocket Town and he couldn't possibly be persuaded to give a damn.

The deal in this case, however, was far shiftier than most.

The entire SHM Rocket Town contingent showed up to help with the unloading and inventorying of the cargo, taking it all to hangar zero for transfer to another, unknown means that was either hidden or hadn't arrived yet. Vincent, Yuffie, and Cid watched the process through security cameras that normally went mysteriously blank during this process – a little modification of Terrence's that had been since removed.

"Weapons," Vincent muttered. "Look at the labels on those crates – automatic weaponry. Mounted turrets. All sorts of handguns, many of them undoubtedly modified. Ammunition for all of the above. Explosives, both plastic and otherwise. They must have a serious supplier to be able to buy all of these things."

"And a serious source of cash," Yuffie observed. "I mean, if they added up every petty theft and robbery every member of their cult's ever committed, it would come to a hefty sum, but this is ridiculous. They've got to have external backing."

Cid nodded agreement. "Question is, is the external backin' givin' em the cash for this stuff, which they buy from somewhere else, or is it a straight one-on-one thing – weapons in exchange for somethin' other than money?"

"No, definitely the former," Vincent said. "Think about the logistics, Cid. The armaments are being covertly unloaded here for shipping elsewhere. If the SHM were in bed with their suppliers to the point that they could get all this weaponry without payment, why wouldn't they simply have it shipped direct? This is obviously a case of two-front backing."

"'Kay, Valentine, I'm with ya on that. That brings up _new_ questions, whoop-de-fuckin'-doo – does Mr. Weapons know about Mr. Cash bein' the source of the SHM's funds? And does Mr. Cash know that the SHM are spendin' his money on Mr. Weapons?"

"You're suggesting that the SHM could be getting the money under false pretenses and then spending it on arms?" Yuffie asked.

"Not in such a fancy way of sayin' it, but yeah."

"It's unlikely that either source knows about the other," Vincent said, "but if the SHM's source of money can supply them with funds enough to buy this many weapons, then the source will have intelligence to match. They'll be informed as to what their money's being spent on. As for the person or persons who are selling the weapons, I doubt they care where the money comes from so long as they get it."

"Mm. Yer good at this stuff, Valentine."

"Thanks." Vincent checked Cerberus on instinct and then said, "They look as though they're completely finished unloading. Cid, would you do the honors?"

"Would be my pleasure, thanks." A self-satisfied grin on his face, Cid leaned forward to the security panel and started pressing buttons. Alarms sounded, the SHMs all jumped in surprise, and hangar zero was suddenly sealed off by massive steel security doors.

"Attention Silver-Haired Dickweeds," Cid crowed into the security console's microphone, his voice blasting out at the assembled malcontents. "Drop yer weapons, line yourselves up 'gainst the south wall, and be good boys 'n girls and nobody's gonna get hurt."

The SHMs' reply was to start assembling a rather large rocket launcher. Clearly they were going to blow their way out, and the security door wouldn't hold for long against firepower like that.

"Silver-Haired Dickweeds?" Yuffie asked. "Is there anything left in that skull of yours, Cid?"

"Enough to know that the doors ain't got a snowball's chance in hell. Let's go, kiddo!"

"I am not a kid!" Yuffie protested at Cid's back as he grabbed his spear and sped out of the room. She flipped him off as he disappeared and pouted as she checked her equipment, making sure she was ready. "You sure the three of us are gonna be enough, Vinnie? There _are_ about four hundred of 'em."

"Three hundred and ninety-three," Vincent said, completing his check on Cerberus. "I counted."

For a moment, Yuffie just smiled at him, eyes warm with affection. "You're great, Vincent. You know that?"

Vincent didn't quite know how to reply, so he shrugged and holstered Cerberus. "Let's go or Cid won't leave any for us."

This was going to be interesting.


	8. Chapter VIII

It was early morning in Edge, and Pan couldn't sleep. He'd been up all night, pacing his office and yelling at anyone who tried to enter. Word had quickly spread through the SHM compound that Commander Pan was in one of his moods again.

The fact was that it wasn't a mood induced by the normal gamut of chemical imbalances that Pan's enhanced biosystem put him through on a near-daily basis. This was far, far worse, scales of magnitude worse than simply being the victim of experimental technology that did its job all too well.

Pan had writer's block.

It had started as just something he did in his spare time, but Pan had found that writing was one of the few things that genuinely calmed him, especially when his blood fever was at its peak and there were no enemies to kill. It was true that their leader could supply Pan with any number of new subordinates if he happened to kill one in a blind rage, but he preferred not to waste men.

Normally, Pan wrote before he went to bed, to get himself to sleep more easily. However, he had hit a snag in his novel's plot and was utterly helpless to iron it out, a dilemma that set his blood boiling and made it impossible for anything but being knocked unconscious to get him to sleep. The source of his comfort had turned into a new source of torment; he paused a moment in his pacing to reflect on the irony of that and tried to draw inspiration from it, but nothing came.

Nothing was coming. Choking back a roar, Pan punched another crater into the latest concrete block he'd had delivered – better to break these than anything in his office. He was tired and out of inspiration and his "upgrades" were going haywire, and he wanted very desperately to kill something. He swore that the next subordinate that interrupted him and failed to somehow inspire him was going to end up with at least some broken bones… if he was lucky.

Not a moment later, a knock sounded on his office door. Pan jerked and moved behind his desk, not caring how the holed concrete block sitting in a corner of the room contrasted sharply with the rest of the office's muted, refined furnishings. Anyone who knew him knew not to comment; anyone who didn't know quickly learned to ignore half-destroyed objects in his possession. "Come in," he finally called.

It was another one of those countless scurrying aids that were around the base these days. The boy's hair had been dyed sloppily and he was barely in uniform; Pan curled his lip and stifled the urge to chuck a paperweight. "What?"

"Sir, I'm afraid I have some bad news." The boy's face was white as bone and he had to struggle to keep from stuttering. Everyone on the base knew that if they stuttered in Pan's presence it was likely he would gut them. It was a pet peeve of his.

"Go on."

"Our contingent in Rocket Town has been completely wiped out. They were in the midst of unloading the latest weapons shipment from our benefactor on the inside when they were sealed in by the security system – a trap. When they tried to blow their way out, three hundred and ninety-five of them were taken down and into custody."

Pan slowly leaned forward in his chair until his elbows rested on the desk. "I find that hard to believe. Who did it?"

"Luckily, sir, one of our brothers managed to escape – he was slow in following the rest of our brethren into the unloading-transfer site, so when the trap was sprung he was outside it. He knew he'd be hunted down if he stayed, so he hitched a ride with the airship from Lockhart Industries and came here immediately."

"I see. Do you have him with you?" The boy nodded and stepped aside to allow in an even younger Silver-Haired Man. Pan studied the newcomer and asked, "Your name?"

Terrence reminded himself not to stutter; in the two hours he'd been here, he'd heard stories about what Pan did to people who stuttered. The commander only looked to be in his late twenties, with charismatic features and fair skin, growing his silver hair out long. Terrence had also heard about Pan's past, or what little was known of it. He was the only survivor of a failed experimental WRO supersoldier program, four or five years back – an unethical and highly illegal scientific experiment conducted by certain members of the WRO's R&D branch in secret without permission from the higher-ups. The results… well. Pan was small, only about five and a half feet tall, with a wispy build that suggested very little strength.

The holes in the concrete block in the corner said different.

"Your _name_," Pan growled. "I don't like repeating myself."

Terrence caught himself. "Apologies, sir. I'm Terrence, sir."

"I see. And you were fortunate enough to escape this trap?"

"Yessir."

Pan leaned back in his chair and studied the boy, then flicked his eyes shut and accessed his memory. What had Terrence's posting been? There it was. "You were assigned as the mole within airfield security that allowed us access to hangar zero."

"Yessir."

"Pray tell, then, how all three hundred and ninety-five other Silver-Haired Men were caught, and you, the one ostensibly in charge of making sure precisely what happened yesterday _doesn't happen, _were not."

Terrence swallowed. "I was negligent in my duties. I forgot to disable the security cameras in the hangars we were operating in, and I was lagging behind during the unloading process. I have no excuse."

Pan nodded. "Very good. You know how to take responsibility for your mistakes." He opened a drawer in the side of his desk and withdrew a pair of black leather gloves. "Then you should also know, Terrence, how to take the punishment for them."

Again Terrence swallowed, his throat becoming extremely dry nonetheless. "Yessir."

"Good." Pan stood, slipping on the gloves and strolling over to stand in front of Terrence, sizing him up. He was a handspan shorter than the boy, but Terrence still felt as though he was being looked down on. "Are you aware, Terrence, of my… _modifications?_"

"Yessir."

A grin slowly spread across Pan's face, and it was not a pleasant sight. "Let me demonstrate one for you."

He drew his right arm back, hand closing into a fist, and suddenly the appendage explosively expanded in size, the loose-fitting leather of Pan's coat abruptly stretched to the breaking point by enormous muscles.

The blow was beyond pain; Terrence blacked out when it made full contact with his chest. He woke what seemed only a moment later and found that he had been thrown back down the long hallway leading up to Pan's office, only stopping when he slammed against the far wall and crumpled over into the fetal position he was in now. His ribs were moving with a life of their own and he couldn't breathe.

"I struck you lightly," Pan said placidly, standing over him. His arm had shrunk back to its normal size. "If I'd hit you hard, your chest would have been pulverized." He looked over his shoulder at his subordinate. "Bring a Cure materia; I still have a use for this one."

The world was fading in and out and red was creeping at the edge of Terrence's vision, but he was still very much aware as Pan crouched next to him and whispered, "You're going to make a wonderful spy."

* * *

Twelve hours earlier, an explosion blew the steel security doors of hangar zero outwards. The gathered SHM sent up a cheer; they were home free.

They quickly shut up when they saw the three figures emerging from the smoke.

"A hundred and thirty-one and two-thirds for each of us," Yuffie said. "Think you can keep up, old man?"

Cid snorted. "Don't choke when you eat my dust, kid. Yer boyfriend would be cross with me."

Vincent ignored the two of them and started shooting.

His aim was perfect and he switched targets with lightning-fast speed, taking down six of them before they even knew what was happening. He had Cerberus firing single rounds instead of triple; he didn't need a tri-round burst to take down delinquents. The SHM started screaming as they took bullets in their shoulders, feet, thighs… Vincent had made sure to use the smallest caliber ammunition Cerberus supported – he didn't want to leave any exit wounds that could be immediately fatal.

Within seconds he'd dropped eighteen SHM and was reloading. Yuffie and Cid had each jumped into a separate part of the crowd and had started tearing through their opponents. These SHM were mostly teenagers and young people who were part of the group for kicks or any money they could steal; they were no challenge. They didn't scurry for cover behind the innumerable crates or try to organize; commands were shouted by their leaders in vain. Wild small-arms fire exploded throughout the hangar but succeeded in doing nothing except hitting friendlies.

By the time the group was organized by their leadership at all, Vincent, Yuffie, and Cid had taken out perhaps a third of them. The SHM backed into a relatively empty corner of the hangar, clustering in tight, forcing Vincent, Yuffie, and Cid to charge them and be cut down in the process. All the SHM had on them were small-arms weaponry; they might have been shipping heavy weapons, but everything was very securely packaged and impossible to get into in the midst of an attack. It had taken them a good five minutes to get through the packaging of the rocket launcher they'd used to blow open the door, and that now lay discarded, useless without more ammunition.

Vincent crouched behind a large stack of crates as small-arms fire pinged off of the containers and thudded into the wall behind him. He cast a glance around for Yuffie and Cid, found them, and channeled his energy through the Fire materia that Yuffie had given him. A small flame coalesced in front of Yuffie, who was taking cover in a fashion similar to Vincent, and another appeared in front of Cid, who had just taken down three more of the attackers and had thrown himself flat to avoid a sudden concentrated barrage of bullets. The SHM were finally getting organized; it was time to switch tactics.

Both Yuffie and Cid shielded their eyes on seeing the flames, and Vincent reached to his belt and pulled free a flashbang. He chucked it over the crates he was behind and waited two seconds.

There was an enormous flash of light, illuminating every dark corner of the massive bay, and an explosion of sound that was sure to temporarily deafen anyone within the immediate vicinity of the blast. When Vincent popped up from behind cover, the SHM were to a man holding their ears, clamping their hands over their eyes, or trying to do both at once. _Their fault for clustering like that._

Vincent holstered Cerberus and charged at the same time as Yuffie and Cid. He waded into the flailing mass of limbs and bodies and started taking them out with rapid-fire nerve arrests and knockout blows, all with his right hand and his feet – his gauntlet would be a little too damaging if he jabbed someone in the neck with it. Yuffie and Cid were also taking down SHM at high speed, Yuffie favoring hand-to-hand attacks over potentially fatal attacks with her boomerang-shuriken. Cid just flailed about with his lance, taking down at least half a dozen with each sweep of the pole, and was careful not to stick anything with the spearhead.

By the time the debilitating effects of the flashbang had faded, there weren't enough SHM left to make a difference.

* * *

Every policeman and volunteer militia member in Rocket Town turned out to take the SHM into custody. The ones that Vincent had shot, a small number compared to the whole, were taken to the hospital. There were no fatalities there; Vincent had been careful and accurate with his shots.

The rest were either incarcerated, or, if they were still minors, sent home to their parents. If there was a world record for the amount of teenagers grounded and otherwise disciplined within a single night, there was little doubt it had been broken.

"So," Yuffie said as they watched the last of the SHM be taken away. "The three of us just took out almost four hundred SHM. Are we awesome or are we awesome?"

"Circumstances bein' what they are, I'd say yeah," Cid agreed. "Sure, we ambushed 'em and they were a bunch of undisciplined scrubs and couldn't hit the broad side of a barn to save their lives, but whatever. Shit yeah."

Vincent wasn't listening; he was busy looking over the weaponry that had been confiscated after the crackdown. He went over crate after crate, prying them open and inspecting their contents, a growing suspicion and dread mounting in his gut. The fact that the airship had belonged to Lockhart Industries was bad enough, though the pilot had obviously been bribed.

This, however, was far worse.

When Yuffie finally walked over to where Vincent was inspecting yet another weapon, he looked as though they'd just suffered a major defeat and hadn't arrested a single malcontent. "What's wrong?" she asked.

He looked at her, his expression unreadable to anyone who didn't know him – but he was an open book to her, and both of them knew it. "Look at these weapons," he said after a moment, gesturing at the long line of opened crates and the devices of death therein. "The craftsmanship, the design, the quality – there's only one organization in the world capable of mass-producing such high-end weaponry on such a massive scale."

"…And that would be?" Yuffie asked impatiently.

Vincent stared at her, almost shocked that she didn't find it obvious. "Easy. The WRO."


	9. Chapter IX

Vincent had nothing to do, so he sat on the roof of Cid's house and brooded. The capture of all the Silver-Haired Men within Rocket Town paled before the enormity of the new discovery: the World Regenesis Organization was supplying the dissidents.

Still, Vincent reasoned, that was putting things a tad ominously. More likely than not, it was only a small faction within the WRO that was managing to sell the weapons to the SHM. No organization stayed free of corruption forever, no matter how pure the intentions of its leaders, and weeding corruption out was just part of the process of staying in business.

Impulsively, Vincent pulled out his cell phone and dialed Reeve's number, then sighed and flipped the phone shut before he hit the call button. That would be worse than useless; it had been years since Vincent had last received a call from that particular phone number. Even if it had been Reeve's phone that had led Vincent to Kalm and had gotten him involved in the Deepground imbroglio, that had been seven years ago. There was no way Reeve would have stayed with that one number for so long.

There was, however, someone else that Vincent thought he could call. Someone who thought, as necessity demanded, in the long term…

* * *

Being in the same time zone as Rocket Town, it was early morning in Cosmo Canyon when Red XIII's phone rang. He perked up an ear and came fully awake, wondering who would be calling at this time of day – night – whichever it might be. 

(Nanaki? Your phone?)

That was Naiad, his mate. Her familiar cackle-purr came from outside Bugenhagen's house, the house they now shared; she'd been stargazing. Red XIII got nimbly to his feet, padding off of the nest of blankets and furs the two of them normally slept upon on the bottom floor and casting his gaze around the small room for where he'd left his phone. (It is,) he growled back. (I have no idea who it is, though.)

Red XIII gave up looking for it and instead closed his good eye and listened, pinpointing where the sound was coming from a moment later – what he should have done in the first place. He still wasn't entirely awake. Moving to a low table covered in books and astronomical charts, he awkwardly picked the phone up off of it with his paw and nudged it open with his nose. There was no way for him to press buttons with any accuracy, so Reeve had ordered a phone custom-made for him a while back; it could only receive calls, but it was made to be easier to handle for Red XIII than a conventional phone and it was permanently on speakerphone.

Now that he'd gotten it open and settled back on the table, Red XIII asked, "Hello?"

"It's Vincent," the voice on the other end of the line said. "You're awfully loud."

Red XIII retreated two paces from the table. "Apologies. I was too close to the receiver. It's good to hear from you, Vincent."

"The same. Is Naiad well?"

"She is, thank you." It had been about eight years, now, since Red XIII had met Naiad while oil prospecting with Barret on one of the southern islands. She hadn't been named Naiad then; it was a name he later gave her for her ocean-blue eyes. "And so is the rest of the Canyon. What's the occasion for this call, Vincent?"

"I need a favor," Vincent said. "It's about the WRO."

Red XIII frowned to himself, though a human might have mistaken the alien expression for a snarl. "You do? I hope you realize I have no pull with the WRO. Reeve is my friend, but…"

"I know Cosmo Canyon's not part of the WRO, either. Don't worry, I don't want anything that might make you owe Reeve one. I actually want Cloud's number."

"Cloud's? You don't want to contact Reeve if this concerns his company?"

"There's a possibility of corruption within the WRO, Red – more a certainty, actually – and I can't rule out that Reeve might be involved."

That was troubling. "Careful, Vincent," Red XIII cautioned his old friend. "I would be very careful as to what accusations I lobbed about."

"Careful is exactly what I'm being, that's why I can't exclude Reeve from the list of suspects," Vincent replied assuringly.

"Then why is Cloud exempt? He works for the WRO, you know. I'm sure that Cid will have told you that at least once by now. He disapproves, after all."

"I can't imagine Cloud, of all people, aiding a Sephiroth cult. On top of that, Cid called him the WRO's trashman, which I can't see Cloud doing or Reeve approving of. I thought he was exaggerating a bit."

"Cloud's official position within the WRO is commander-in-chief of the special forces branch of the army. He goes into the action himself most of the time, though; it's not a desk job."

There was a pause, and Red XIII could imagine the distasteful look on Vincent's face. The Turks had been a similar unit within Shin-Ra, making up the Investigative Division of the General Affairs Department, but that had merely been an empty label given to mask their true purpose. Red XIII was sure that the idea of Cloud being in command of a similar band of elites was less than welcome to Vincent. "Well, keep this to yourself, Red, but… Cloud's division isn't by chance in charge of weapons manufacturing and distribution? Or involved in any way?"

"That much you can be sure of," Red XIII affirmed. "Armaments manufacturing is under Tseng's command."

Another pause. "Tseng works for the WRO?"

"Tseng is in charge of armaments manufacturing. Elena doesn't hold a formal position within the WRO, but she _is_ married to Tseng. Rude is in charge of the general army; he was promoted last year. The only ex-Turk that doesn't work for the WRO is Reno."

"For obvious reasons," Vincent said. "All right, then, so my initial feeling on Cloud was right. What's his number?"

"A moment." Red XIII closed his eye again, racked his memories, found Cloud's cell number, and told Vincent. "Do you need anything else?"

"…No. Wait, one thing."

"Name it."

"Stay clear of the WRO, Red. I think there are about to be some major shake-downs. Oh, and if any SHM come visiting… don't trust them."

"Understood," Red XIII said. "I'll hopefully be seeing you later then, Vincent."

"Mm. Thanks, Red. Tell Naiad goodnight for me."

* * *

Being hours ahead of Rocket Town, it was about time in Edge for everybody to go to work when Cloud's phone rang.

Tifa stirred and looked across Cloud's sleeping form to see the phone on his nightside stand vibrating. The two of them usually slept in, as Marlene and Denzel were responsible enough to head to school themselves and Tifa only opened the bar at noon. She was technically in charge of Lockhart Industries, the mega-conglomerate that Strife Deliveries had evolved into ages ago, but for her part she just ran her bar and let the machine run itself. Cloud, when he was home, was always tired from his work for the WRO, so any extra hours of sleep he could snatch helped.

Right now he was dead asleep, and Tifa thought it would be a shame to wake him, so she reached over him, grabbed his phone, and flipped it open, flopping back against her pillow and pulling the sheet over herself before saying, "Hello?"

The deep, sonorous voice in her ear caused her to jump. "Tifa. It's Vincent."

"Vincent," she breathed. "How long has it been?"

"Too long," the gunman said, brushing aside the question. "Is Cloud there?"

"He's asleep right now – you just caught us in bed, actually. We tend to get up late. What's going on?"

"What's your position within the WRO?" Vincent asked.

The question threw Tifa for a loop, but she answered, "I don't have one. I still run my bar. Cloud's the one who works for the WRO."

"Good. Then keep what I'm about to tell you absolutely secret, Tifa. You're aware of the Sephiroth cult, the Silver-Haired Men."

"You can't cross the street in Edge these days without seeing one or two of them. It's not pleasant being around Cloud when they're nearby, either – you should see the way he looks at them."

"I wouldn't blame him," Vincent said drily. "Tonight, or technically yesterday, Yuffie, Cid and I busted all the SHM in Rocket Town. We caught them right in the middle of a massive weapons offload and transfer operation, and the weapons are obviously of WRO make."

Tifa sat up straight at this news, her lingering sleepiness and lack of clothes forgotten. "You're joking."

"I wish I was," Vincent said grimly.

"I wish you were, too," Cloud murmured. Tifa started and looked at him and saw that his glowing greenish-blue eyes were open.

"How long have you been awake?" she demanded.

"Since you reached over me to grab my phone," the blonde sighed. "Put it on speaker." Tifa hit a button and put the phone on the bed between them. "Vincent, good to hear from you," Cloud said, a bit louder.

"I thought you were asleep," Vincent said without missing a beat.

"Kind of hard to stay asleep when Tifa practically crawled over me to answer your call." He ignored the swat she gave him on his shoulder and continued, "If I'm not mistaken…"

"You heard me correctly. An armaments leak."

"Tseng is not going to be happy."

"Tseng, if Red was correct about his position, might be responsible," Vincent replied archly. "Are you sure of his loyalties, Cloud? Maybe Rufus is trying to stir up trouble and has some pull with his former employees within the company?"

"Rufus," Tifa interrupted, "has been living in Kalm for four years now, ever since he personally financed and helped complete its rebuilding after the Deepground Incident. That cost him a good deal of what was left of his fortune after he helped the WRO get on its feet, not to mention that settlement with Wutai years ago, but he doesn't care about money at this point. We see him every few months; he's kept busy in his garden there and is heading up several different non-profit organizations dedicated to restoring the Planet. I somehow doubt he's involved."

"It would be just like Rufus to put up that careful a façade," Vincent observed darkly. "But let's disregard him for the moment, then. Cloud, can you think of anyone who would have SHM sympathies within the WRO? Or some reason to help them, if only to impede the WRO's progress?"

"No," Cloud said. "The WRO is full of committed and loyal people. I don't think any of them want to see the SHM prosper or the WRO destabilized. Let's face it, Vincent, things have never been so good. The economy is on the rise, the Planet is being healed, and apart from occasional seditious movements, things are peaceful. Are you sure you couldn't be wrong about where the weapons came from?"

Tifa sucked in a bit of air through her teeth; Cloud should have known better than to question Vincent's judgment. There was a moment of silence and then Vincent said, "You're sure that your loyalty to the WRO isn't influencing your _own _judgment here?"

"You think it would?" Cloud asked. "Vincent, I think you need to double-check your findings. I really do. As far as I know, everything within the WRO is fine."

"As far as you know."

"If there's something that I'm not informed of, the only person who knows about it would be Reeve. As commander-in-chief of the special forces division, I have top-level clearance in all matters except those marked S-class top secret."

Vincent went silent again, obviously considering his options. "Well, then. I suppose I'll have to get in contact with Tseng and trace where these weapons went after they were manufactured… if they were ever officially manufactured at all. Do you have his number?"

"No," Cloud said, disappointment reflected in his mako eyes. "Sorry. For about three months now, Elena's been very ill; we're not sure what it is, but Tseng tends to want total privacy when not at work. Says it's better for her health. He changed all his phone numbers and can only be reached through normal channels at the WRO. You could put in a request for an appointment, but…"

"It would take four to six weeks."

"About that."

"In that case, I'll have to find another way to reach him. Thank you, Cloud. And you too, Tifa."

"Take care of yourself, Vincent," Cloud said. "Say hello to Yuffie and Cid for me."

"I think Cid would stab me in the face if I did," Vincent replied, his voice very dry indeed. "Still, if you insist, I will."

"Good luck," Tifa put in, only half-mischievously. There was a small _hmmph _from the other end of the line and then Vincent hung up.

Lying back again, Tifa rolled onto her side and looked at Cloud to find that he was deep in thought, his gaze unfocused. "You think something's really wrong?" she asked. "It could just be Vincent."

Cloud shook his head. "Vincent hasn't been wrong about much in all the time I've known him. I'll put out a couple queries, see about those weapons… discreetly, of course."

"Of course." Tifa kissed him and moved closer to his side. "Don't worry too much about it – at least not until the SHM start knocking on our front door." She said it playfully, but Cloud's expression still hardened.

"Bastards." He pulled her against him and shut his eyes, repeating the word.

He was still saying it when he fell asleep twenty minutes later.


	10. Chapter X

If he'd had even the slightest belief that the old pilot would listen or that his traveling companion would permit it, Vincent would have told Cid to take Yuffie and him to Edge instead of Wutai. However, he knew that there was no chance of being able to get to Tseng or get in contact with him as things stood, so when Cid shouted up at him to get ready to leave, Vincent resigned himself to the fact that he'd have to deal with the SHM in Wutai before he could continue his WRO investigation.

Then again, he told himself, the SHM in Wutai could provide him with further leads. It was unlikely he'd be able to gain any more information by refusing and staying here; with the cult officially disbanded in Rocket Town following the bust, it would be like trying to squeeze blood from a particularly uncooperative stone.

Still, the fact remained that Vincent would vastly prefer going to Edge or staying here or even going back to Nibelheim and heading back into the underground cellar than what he was about to do. The flight from Rocket Town aboard the _Shera_ seemed to stretch into days despite its relative briefness. The anticipation was building in Vincent's gut, and it was unpleasant in the extreme.

It was late afternoon when Cid finally set the airship down in Wutai, though it was technically only mid-afternoon due to their losing several hours in transit. They convened on the bridge as post-flight procedures were being run through.

Cid, chewing on his usual stick of nicotine gum, sat back in his chair and said, "So. What's yer next step, kiddo?"

Yuffie shrugged. "I don't know how long it'll take for us to resolve the SHM situation in Wutai, but after that, I think Vinnie and I might want to head to Edge… considering what we found in hangar zero."

"Considering," Vincent agreed drily.

"Fine with me," Cid said. "Jes' remember to call for me a day in advance and pack yer toothbrushes; it's a long flight from here to Edge."

"Will do," Yuffie said cheerfully. "Thanks for the ride, Cid."

"I never said I was doin' this gratis, hon. I got a favor to ask of ya."

Vincent stopped himself from quirking a smile as Yuffie turned a pale shade of green. Cid's favors were usually neither pleasant nor within the usual spectrum of human needs.

Yuffie finally managed to ask, "Yeah?"

Looking around the bridge conspiratorially, Cid leaned towards the two of them and said, his voice hushed, "Get me a pack of fuckin' cigarettes. This gum tastes like shit and the patches don't like stickin' to me. Must be my natural charm. I don't care what kind, just get me a pack. And don't tell Shera."

Her eye twitching, Yuffie stared at him for a long moment and then asked, "And you couldn't ask us to go buy you cigarettes in Rocket Town… _why?_"

"Shera's got every goddamned tobacco shop owner in the town on her payroll. They tell her if anyone comes in to buy cigarettes for me, and she gives 'em her special home-made cinnamon rolls."

"Wow. I'd tattle on you, too."

"So… yeah. Get. me. some. cigarettes. _Please._" Cid looked as though he was about to choke on the last word, but he managed to get it out.

"Will do. And don't forget to give us an analysis on that head we gave you."

"I'll do it first thing, soon's I get back to Rocket Town. Haven't really been lookin' forward to it. Oh, and by the by – the package for yer boyfriend's inside yer luggage. I hope he likes it."

Anyone else in her position, having known Cid for as many years as she had, might have given the old pilot an affectionate kiss on the cheek. Yuffie, on the other hand, clapped him on both shoulders and said, "Thanks. See ya!" before flouncing off of the bridge. "Hurry up, Vinnie, and stop pretending to be part of the furniture," she called as she left. "You're too stiff."

Vincent restrained a grimace and gave Cid a nod before he swept after the ninja-girl. This was going to be unpleasant.

* * *

He was waiting for them when they got off of the _Shera._ He didn't bother wearing a suit, anymore; since he was no longer a Turk, he opted for a white tee and baggy denim shorts. People stared at him as they passed, though the stares numbered less than they had in years past – he was a fairly common sight in Wutai, now. One might have thought they were staring at the explosion of red hair topping his head, or the anachronistic goggles on his brow, or the oak walking stick he clutched in his right hand, but that would only be if one was unaware of the gaping void where his right leg should have been.

Granted, Reno was only missing his right leg from the knee down, but he still had phantom pains at times, even years after the fact. Once upon a time he'd needed crutches, but now he could get around fairly quickly with just the walking stick. He'd gotten used to not being as mobile as he had been, had come to accept the stares and awkward questions from children too young to understand. It was fairly easy for him, after all. Reno was not the sort to protest the injustices of Fate – he knew better.

Once, before they'd lost contact, been pulled apart by diverging circumstances and life in general, he'd gone drinking with Cloud. Eventually the man had asked, point-blank, how Reno could tolerate it. "How can you go on living?" The phrasing was poor, but Cloud had been drunk, and he might be a buffoon, but he was an honest buffoon.

Reno had grinned at him and recited the last stanza of his newfound favorite poem. "It matters not how strait the gate, how charged with punishments the scroll; I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul."

He came back to the present out of the fog of reminiscence as Yuffie dropped her luggage on the unloading ramp and nearly bowled him over with her embrace. She pulled her face away from his chest long enough to kiss him before she asked, "Did you miss me?"

"You were gone, sugar?" Reno replied insolently. She grinned at him and kissed him again.

The ex-Turk let the fiery glow of her kiss warm him before he turned his gaze away and settled it on the red-cloaked man standing, very alone, on the unloading ramp.

Vincent crossed his arms over his chest. "Reno. It's been a while."

"Yeah, Vincent," Reno said. "It has." He half-expected a phantom pain to strike him out of opportunistic spite, but nothing came. Small favors.

There was a long, uncomfortable silence before Yuffie finally exclaimed, "Well, no point in standing out here like a bunch of slackjawed dumbasses. Boys, get my luggage. We'll take a little stroll back to my place."

Vincent bent to take Yuffie's baggage, two large and violently pink suitcases, but Reno crossed the distance as fast as any person with two legs could have and plucked up one of the bags. "I got this one, Vincent. No worries."

"No worries," Vincent repeated, trying not to stare at the gaping void where Reno's limb should have been. He could almost hear the explosion, see that deadly flash of light…

"Vinnie, stop spacing out," Yuffie interrupted him. "Let's go."

The next twenty minutes was an exercise in torture. Yuffie talked up a storm to both of them, taking every possible opportunity to make them have to acknowledge one another's presences or, even worse, talk to each other for a period of longer than five seconds. It was immensely difficult to keep a straight face during the proceedings and Vincent was sweating by the time they finally arrived at Yuffie's house.

They entered the den and Yuffie had them put her luggage down. "Well, you two hang out here for five minutes. I'm gonna go use the ladies' room." Before Vincent could attempt to protest, she was gone like a feather on the wind, leaving him alone with Reno.

Nothing was said for a minute. They seated themselves on opposite couches and were silent. Vincent was determined to make Reno be the one to make the first attempt to breach the wall and simultaneously certain that Reno was doing exactly the same to him. The tension mounted until it was almost palpable, but still neither of them said anything. Vincent kept flicking his gaze to the lost leg, tantamount to a hole in Reno's body, and then flicking it away, not wanting the ex-Turk to catch him staring.

Finally Reno said, "You can look if you want. It's free."

Vincent made no attempt to appear calmed by the dry humor in the other man's voice. Seated as he was, the stump of Reno's leg protruded just enough from the lip of his shorts to be visible.

Still attempting to somehow break the ice – or, to follow the metaphor a step further, the glacier – Reno continued, "I hear some people are really into amputees. Y'know? I said to Yuffie, I could make some good money in the film industry, if y'know what I mean." He quieted for a moment before reflecting, "She hit me."

Now the tension was unbearable. Vincent still had nothing to say, could summon none of his faculties to find some kind of germane topic to discuss.

At length, Reno heaved a sigh, grabbed his walking stick, and pushed himself to his feet – foot, Vincent corrected himself. Reno hobbled over to Vincent and grabbed him by the collar, pulling him half out of his seat and bringing Vincent's face within inches of his own. His turquoise eyes narrowed and he bared his teeth in a grimace.

"Is this what you want, Vincent?" he asked. "Do you want me to beat the fuck out of you? Will that make you feel better?"

Vincent worked his mouth into saying, "No."

"Why not, eh? It'd sure as hell make _me_ feel better, right?"

"Because," Vincent said, the words sounding flat and trite in his own ears, "it wouldn't change anything."

Reno locked gazes with him, a difficult feat for anyone, and held it for a long, strained moment before releasing Vincent and letting him sag back against the couch. "Damn right it wouldn't. What's done is done. Stop being a bitch about it." He moved back to his own seat and settled himself in with a sigh before calling, "All right, Yuffie, it's been a lot longer than five fucking minutes. You can come out now."

There was an audible flushing sound and then running water before Yuffie finally emerged from the hallway, an offended look on her face. "I don't know what you're talking about, Reno. I was just in the bathroom for longer than I thought."

"Right, and I'm Rufus's and Scarlet's lovechild. Stop being sneaky."

She stuck her tongue out at him but gracefully seated herself adjacent, grinning. "So glad you boys made up – not that I heard anything."

Vincent rolled his eyes, but only a small amount; he was fairly sure they could move in opposite directions and overdoing gestures like that was generally confusing and unpleasant. "Well. Reno was persuasive."

"Just a matter of knowing how to deal with you, Vincent," Reno said easily. "Not that it was ever that difficult to begin with."

"Play nice, now," Yuffie said warningly. "What time is it, sugar?"

Reno checked his wristwatch. "Quarter to three. Why?"

A bit of mischief entered Yuffie's eyes, and Vincent braced himself. "I think we should just chill out for a couple hours and then go out. You have a spare suit for Vinnie, right?"

"If he wants to squeeze into it, sure."

Vincent started to raise a hand to object, but Yuffie shot him a look. "Nuh-uh, Vinnie. I'm not going out with you when you're dressed like a vampire. Go take a shower and comb out your hair."

"_Comb out my hair? _It's down to the small of my back!"

"Have fun," she said with a wicked grin. "Oh, and you might want to keep an eye on the showerhead. I have a camera in it, entirely for security reasons. If it starts blinking a red light you're being recorded." She stretched a bit and added, "I'll have the boy lay out your suit for you in the guestroom. Boy, lay out Vincent's suit for him in the guestroom."

"Yes'm," Reno said, faux-submissively. He got up, gave her a formal bow at the waist, and disappeared down the hallway.

Vincent waited a beat, then said, "Entirely for security reasons."

Yuffie's grin widened. "Here's lookin' at you, Vinnie."


	11. Chapter XI

Yuffie's bathroom was a spacious bath-and-shower affair with a long, tiled island of two sinks along the wall and a cupboard of towels and other toiletries above it. Vincent double-checked the lock on the bathroom door before he moved to the showerhead and stared into it. Any normal observer would have found nothing, but Vincent had done more than a normal observer's worth of hidden camera placement and removal in his lengthy lifetime, so it was easy enough for him to spot the lens. The camera was turned off, though, so Vincent shrugged, withdrew Cerberus from its holster and put it on the tile next to the nearest sink, then began the methodical process of getting his clothes off.

Why would Yuffie have left the recording light visible to anyone in the shower? The answer, he reflected as he tugged off his boots, was simple enough; if she was going to be recording Reno, she would want him to know she was doing it. It wasn't voyeurism or even anything that sexual – it was just a routine invasion of his privacy. Yuffie hated being kept out of anything, from locked safes to other people's solitude. And Reno, Vincent knew, was laid-back and mischievous enough in his own right to indulge her.

Vincent's belts came next. He unbuckled the ones about his waist and undid the ones holding his cloak on; it slid to the floor and lay there, old and tattered. The headband that kept his hair out of his face – more or less – was more tightly wound than Vincent remembered, but it came undone easily enough. Now he instinctively started for the glove on his right hand, but that was a tad difficult to remove with his left hand the way it was, so…

His arm came free from the gauntlet with a sharp sucking sound, and the appendage fell to the floor with a clatter. Vincent looked at his leather-sheathed left arm for a minute before shrugging and tugging his right glove off, then pulling at the leather sleeve and removing it completely. The flesh beneath was pale, but entirely normal.

A flash: that arm, simultaneously scaled and furred, iridescent, flexing and twisting with a life of its own unless he kept it imprisoned in the gauntlet. Compared to that arm, the rest of his body's modifications had paled in comparison. The demons in his head were gone, though – they'd been a gone a long time – and their extirpation had returned his arm to as close to normal as it could get. Vincent looked at the hand attached; its fingernails were a shade too long for his tastes. He'd have to trim them.

The rest of his clothes only took another twenty seconds to remove, being in comparison to his gauntlet and cloak far less interesting or difficult to pull off. With a sigh, Vincent ran a hand through his hair and suppressed a shudder at the thought of having to shampoo it and comb it out. He didn't sweat like a normal human being, so there was little need for him to shower unless he was drenched in blood like he'd been after the fight with the mako beast. Even then he'd studiously avoided his hair, afraid of the daunting task it represented.

Nothing for it. It wasn't going to kill him to have to tug at his scalp a bit. Besides, Yuffie would be incorrigible if he didn't at least attempt to placate her. Vincent removed a towel from the cupboard and set it on the other side of the sink, then turned to get into the shower.

It was at this point in time when he registered a strange whirring. It was a moment later, when Vincent's gaze fixed itself on the showerhead, when he found the source of the sound: the showerhead was not only blinking red, it had twisted itself around to face him and was panning up and down, taking in the formidable show he was giving the woman on the other end.

"YUFFIE!"

* * *

"Nice abs, Vincent," Reno said an hour later.

Vincent, dressed in a bathrobe and surveying with some dismay the suit that Reno had laid out for him, turned at the sound of the man's voice. The redhead stood in the doorway to the guestroom, a crooked grin on his face.

Despite their somewhat terse reconciliation of that afternoon and Reno's subsequent, lackadaisical attitude towards what had happened in the past, Vincent still felt a trickle of ice run through his gut whenever he looked at the missing leg. He forced himself to arch an eyebrow and ask, "You were watching?"

"Well, not like I was checking you out or anything. Yuffie wanted to see how long it would take you to notice her watching that striptease you were giving us."

"And that was her only reason?"

Reno shrugged. "You know how Yuffie is. She doesn't recognize the concept of privacy."

"Or she chooses not to." Vincent moved to the bed and looked more closely at the suit. It would fit like a glove, all right, but… "Did you have anything else I could wear?"

"What's the matter, Vincent? Don't like zoot suits? I wore that years ago when I had to go to official functions for that whole disastrous arranged marriage of Yuffie's."

"As I recall," Vincent said, holding up the suit and inspecting its oversized shoulders, "it was only disastrous because of your interference. And didn't you end up getting nearly killed in this suit on the same night?"

"Yep. I had it restored."

"Yet you're not wearing it."

"Not out of lack of love. The cane goes just fine with the suit, but…" His gaze drifted to the pants. "I can't really peg the cuffs anymore. Y'know."

"No," Vincent murmured. "I guess you can't."

There was more silence, the kind of silence to which Vincent preferred aural torture, and then Reno said, "But hey, it's not a big deal. You're bigger than me, so it'll fit you like a normal suit would. Sorta. I should go change, myself."

"Reno," Vincent said, stopping him with a word. He hesitated, finding the words, and blurted, "I'm sorry."

"If it's about me having to see you naked, I really don't care one way or the other. I'm pretty security in my mascu-"

"I'm talking about your LEG!" Vincent snarled, rounding on Reno. "I don't care if it was in the past and I don't care if you've forgotten. I haven't." He stopped for a moment and then continued, more quietly, "I haven't forgotten a single detail of that night."

Reno sighed, shook his head, and patted Vincent on the shoulder. "I told you, Vincent. Your problem's always been that you can't let shit go. Sure, I hated you for a long time. I was mad as hell and my life was over and there was nothing I could do because how would killing you make you any worse off than the way you already were? Sleeping in a coffin, not coming out except once in a blue moon to drink a bit of water, or so Yuffie told me when she went to try to talk to you… Fate worse than death, if you ask me."

He leaned a bit more perceptibly on the door, relaxing the weight on his leg. "But I picked myself up and put myself back together. You see that. And I learned a lot about myself that I never would have if it all hadn't happened. And… well. I learned why she chose you, that one night. Hell," and at this he laughed, "I even sorta sympathized. Besides, when have I held past mistakes against people? I didn't want into turn into that guy. So I stopped. And you should stop, too." Reno shifted his cane to his left hand and held out his right. "It's not that bad once you get used to it."

Vincent looked at Reno's hand like it might bite, but he grasped and shook it nonetheless. "I told myself I'd try. I think that's what I'll keep doing."

"Every journey starts with a single step." Reno grinned and started back down the hallway to his and Yuffie's room. "It's just the next million that take a while."

* * *

That evening, the downtown restaurant and club The Jade Dragon had some visitors. Granted, it was always busy, being extremely popular, but these visitors were special and stood out even in the well-dressed crowd that frequented the establishment.

One of them was a tall, raven-haired man, looking somewhat uncomfortable in the pinstriped zoot suit that he filled out. His glossy, tamed hair fell to the small of his back and his ruby eyes gleamed in the low light of the restaurant. With him was another man, a redhead, in a black suit and undershirt with a violently red tie that matched his hair and set off his turquoise eyes. He supported himself with a walking stick, and if one looked at his right leg the reason for that became clear in short order. At his side was a young lady, with short, dark hair, dressed in a slim, diaphanous midnight-blue gown that hugged her curves and showed more than a bit of leg through a front slip.

"This suit is hot," Vincent said as a somewhat-boggled waiter showed them to their table, a booth with enough room for eight.

"Shut up," Yuffie said with a grin, "and enjoy the atmosphere. It's not often I get to go out with a couple of gorgeous hunks."

Vincent felt his eye twitch and he looked to Reno, who was inspecting his nails and looking nonchalant. "She's talking about us like we're not here."

"You say something, sugar?" Reno asked Yuffie pointedly.

"Nothing at all."

The waiter brought their drinks and Vincent tipped his icewater back for a quick sip, then put it back on the table and asked, "So besides the opportunity to be seen in public with the two of us primped in this way, why are we doing this?"

"You'd be surprised how many important public figures show up at this place for an evening out," Yuffie replied. "Here come a couple now, I think."

Two people emerged from the crowd and slipped into the booth, and a jolt of recognition hit Vincent when he saw their faces. They were both dressed in black – the man in a black suit, the woman in a black dress of a cut similar to Yuffie's. A dark, unruly mass of hair hung loosely about the man's casually handsome face, and his sepia eyes took Vincent's gaze in stride. His companion was a delicate flower of a woman, with stylish black hair hanging in a soft curtain about her neck and amethyst eyes seeming to glow from within her pale face.

"Vincent Valentine," Yuffie said, "meet Shigeru Makoto, former leader of the Shinsengumi motorbike gang and now commander-in-chief of the Wusheng, and his wife Takahashi Rei."

"We've already met," Vincent said, somewhat more brusquely than was absolutely necessary. "After your would-be wedding night, actually. I take it you planned this?"

"Kisaragi Yuffie, plan something and not tell her friends?" Makoto asked, a touch of wonder entering his voice. "I never would have guessed. Shame, milady."

"Stow the 'milady' crap, Makoto, or I'll ask your wife to tickle you," Yuffie said threateningly. "And she knows where that really gets you. Do I hear the back of your left knee?"

Makoto's expression went blank and then he looked at Rei, feigning shock. "You betrayed my one weakness to her?"

"It was a girl's night out," Rei replied with a coy smile, "and we were swapping tidbits. I know about a particularly interesting birthmark of Reno's." Across the table, the redheaded ex-Turk looked at Yuffie with surprise, then shrugged and took another sip of his mojito.

"Are there any other public figures coming we should know about?" Vincent asked Yuffie. "Your father, perhaps? Reeve?"

"Nope, this is all the company I thought I'd invite tonight. We need to talk about the SHM, and nobody knows more about the situation than Makoto."

Vincent nodded slowly; this was finally making sense. "It'll seem a tad less suspicious for Makoto to start talking with us if we look like we're having a night out. This way the SHM won't realize what we're up to."

"What the hell are you talking about, Vincent?" Reno asked. "We _are _having a night out. The SHM just might be a topic of conversation while we're here. And I thought you used to be a Turk."

Vincent sighed and took another sip of icewater. "Of course. The SHM and your hidden birthmark are so very germane to one another."

"You gotta think on the cosmic scale. My birthmark could be the key, a weapon of immeasurable power that'll level the SHM and all who stand in the way of our world domination."

"Perhaps," Rei said. "I _do _think the world would fall if it saw precisely where said 'weapon of immeasurable power' was, exactly."

Vincent rubbed at his temples and took another sip of water. This was going to be a long night.


	12. Chapter XII

Dinner had come and gone in short order. That had been an hour ago, and none of the other people in the booth with Vincent seemed like they were going to stop talking anytime soon.

"No way," Yuffie was saying. "What _I _heard was that little-miss-inheritance had gone and run off with a boy-toy and shamed the family shrines by letting him screw her on the altar."

Rei shook her head. "Nope. The baron couldn't have cared less about the family's prestige or the sacred shrines. I heard personally from a friend who heard from his cousin who happens to be a friend of one of the household's maids that the baron only ordered his granddaughter stricken from his will because she drove off with her boyfriend in his vintage Houzuki sports car."

"Such propriety," Reno drawled. He had switched from mojitos to what he called "hard stuff," even though the mojitos qualified because of the rum in it. Vincent eyed the half-emptied bottle in front of the ex-Turk; it was frosted over and its proof was astronomical. At one point Reno had struck a match, dropped it into his shotglass, and laughed at the resulting explosion. Clearly the gossip bored him.

Makoto, for his part, was interjecting where it seemed proper and putting on the long-suffering face of the husband of a popular geisha. Vincent mostly sipped at his icewater and listened to the talk.

This was all only what it seemed to be on the surface. In the time they'd spent in The Jade Dragon, they'd talked directly about the Silver-Haired Men all of two times, and only in passing. The seemingly endless amounts of gossip that Rei and Yuffie were pouring forth was where the meat of the conversation resided.

They'd just gotten through discussing the situation in Wutai, grave that it was, and they'd turned to the bust in Rocket Town. Yuffie's little-miss-inheritance was really the SHM contingent that had existed there, and the tryst on the sacred altar was the takedown in hangar zero. Rei's baron was the rest of the SHM, and the reason he was taking the incident lying down and abandoning Rocket Town – striking little-miss-inheritance from the will, so to speak – was because with the weapons, or Houzuki sports car, gone, he couldn't come and wreak havoc himself. Rei's rather convoluted source, a friend with a cousin who was a friend of someone on the inside, meant just that, someone on the inside.

Vincent hated code-speaking like this at such length, but the possibility of the SHM having eyes and ears everywhere in Wutai was essentially impossible to discount, especially after Rei's explanation of the latest upgrade to the Wutai airfield's security system.

"If there isn't a security guard standing within six feet, you can be sure you're being recorded. Absolutely nothing slips through that net. Right, Makoto?"

"Yes, dear."

"Makes you feel very secure, it's nice."

Unless any SHM listening in were experts at interpreting code-speak or had preternatural insight, all they would get was random gossip. They might have heard the earlier part of the conversation where Vincent divined the outing's true purpose, but that still told them little about what was being communicated. Even if everything they were saying was common knowledge, it paid to not let the enemy know exactly how much _they _knew. Still, nothing changed the fact that Vincent was bored and desperately wanted something interesting to happen.

That was when two men appeared out of the crowd. One dropped into each end of the booth, effectively trapping Vincent, Yuffie, Reno, Makoto, and Rei inside. Both of them were wearing Mandarin-style tuxedos, and both had short silver hair.

"Hello," the first one said with a grin that was a bit too rueful to be anything but calculated. "I'm sorry to interrupt this fascinating conversation, but if all of you could accompany us outside? And let's not make a scene. It would be a shame if the entire first floor of The Jade Dragon was consumed in an explosion."

The five of them exchanged glances and then Yuffie nodded. "Right. Let's take a walk, I guess."

_Be careful what you wish for, Valentine, _the voice in his head laughed.

* * *

The two SHM had drawn guns as soon as the party had left The Jade Dragon, and they ushered the five of them down a series of alleyways until they were sufficiently removed from the nightclub that nobody important would hear them scream.

Vincent took the opportunity to get a good look at their would-be captors. The leader was perhaps thirty, drawn, with intense blue eyes and ruddy skin. He'd introduced himself as Lex – "A final courtesy, after all, to let you know my name." The implications were lost on none of them.

The other SHM was tall, broad, also dark-skinned. He wore sunglasses to hide his eyes and sported a moustache and beard that framed his mouth. There was something overtly familiar about him and Vincent had a fairly good idea what it was, but he wasn't about to say anything. Lex had introduced the man as Aibo, and explained that he didn't speak.

Vincent could easily have jumped both of them, seeing as how a pair of handguns posed little threat to him, but the two SHM could easily shoot someone else instead of him, and that would be unacceptable. So he kept quiet and walked and waited for an opportunity.

"Stop here," Lex said.

They came to a halt and more SHM melted out of the shadows, at least forty of them. Ten of them carried guns, the rest hefted knives, the occasional sword, and other melee weapons, and they surrounded the five with eager grins on their faces.

"So," Makoto said. "You think you're going to get away with this? Gunning down the Single White Rose of Wutai and the Commander-in-Chief of the Wusheng, not to mention their respective partners and the legendary Vincent Valentine, in a dark alley?"

"I apologize," Lex said with a shrug, leveling his pistol at Makoto. "I have no personal enmity towards you, but Command issued the order as soon as it was made known that Valentine and Kisaragi had arrived in Wutai. We simply took the first opportunity to present itself to us." He paused and then added, "Oh, and I should compliment you on your code-speak before we commence this unpleasant business. I was only able to divine a little of what you were saying, and I have studied the art for a number of years. Truly brilliant."

"It's funny, what they teach you in geisha school nowadays," Rei said. "Code-speak, some hypnotic techniques, persuasion… It's not just innocent entertainment." She effected a pause identical to the one Lex had just given and then said, "Oh, and facial recognition. After all, a geisha has to know her clients even if it's been years or they've changed extensively. Right, Rude?"

Right on cue, Aibo swung his gun around and pointed it at Lex's head. The man stiffened and slowly turned to look at his partner, who was reaching up to the mess of silver hair on his own head. He grabbed it and tugged and it came right off with a sharp _pop_, revealing a naturally bald pate beneath.

"Sorry, partner," Rude said. "Priorities."

"You're not mute, I see," Lex said, his composure unwavering. Vincent noted that; this man was dangerous.

"I don't tend to talk much. Easy for me to fake it."

"Of course. You realize, however, that this was an exceptionally poor time for you to reveal your identity… what with you and your friends outnumbered and surrounded."

"Really?" Makoto interrupted. "I'm not so sure about that, Lex. Commander-in-chief of the Wusheng has its perks." He raised a hand and snapped his fingers and a dozen body-armored Wusheng _onmitsu_, black-cloaked killers of uncanny skill, coalesced soundlessly out of what looked like thin air, swords drawn, hemming in the SHM. "Rest assured any one of them is capable of taking out any of the amateurs that you've gathered here to kill us. You may not be outnumbered, but you certainly are surrounded. They won't let a single one of you escape."

"I hope you realize what this means," Lex said. "A fight like this breaking out between the Wusheng and the Silver-Haired Men will mean war. Are you prepared for that?"

"Who said anyone is going to know? I don't particularly care whether or not we take all of you alive, just that we take you. Who'll miss forty SHM in the world today? Your move."

"I'm here on direct orders from Commander Pan. If I don't report in, _that_ will be missed, if not me. He'll assume failure and give the order for all the SHM in Wutai to riot. Do you honestly think that your Wusheng can hold us down? Not to mention that he's certain to be sending reinforcements even as we speak, just in case it comes to open conflict."

"I have faith in my men," Makoto shot back, "unlike, apparently, your Commander Pan. We'll do whatever is necessary to protect Wutai."

Vincent's fingers twitched; he wished he hadn't left Cerberus at Yuffie's house. The situation was a deadlock, hanging on the edge of a knife. One wrong move by anybody and all the SHM would open fire. The Wusheng _onmitsu_ would take the gunmen down, but not before everybody within the encirclement except Vincent had been shot to death.

Abruptly, he saw that while Lex and Makoto had been back-and-forthing and drawing all eyes, Yuffie had slipped off her right shoe and carefully levered it up with her leg to her hand, and she now clutched it, ready and waiting for the opportune moment. Vincent had a fairly good idea of what she was planning, knowing her, so he also waited, ready to act.

"Commander Pan," Lex retorted, "is an able strategist and knows how to manage his own troops in a combat –"

He struck so fast, in midsentence, that even Vincent didn't see the blow until it was already halfway to its destination. The pistol flew from Rude's grip and Lex followed up with a knee to the bald man's gut, swinging his pistol around at the same moment to try to target Makoto.

The five of them threw themselves to the ground on instinct and Rude let himself crumple from the blow to his abdomen rather than shrugging it off. Surprised by Lex's sudden action, the SHM gunmen were slow, and the initial hail of gunfire went over the party's heads and hit nothing except more SHM. A moment later the Wusheng _onmitsu _struck, and the gunmen were suddenly dead, leaving only the other thirty SHM with melee weapons to contend with.

In the cramped alleyway there was little room to maneuver, but they made do. Rude leapt back to his feet and disarmed Lex with a swift kick, followed by a one-two that rocked the man's head back and nearly took him off his feet. Vincent delivered the coup de grâce, sweeping Lex's stumbling feet out from under him and bringing him crashing to the ground.

The melee had broken out in earnest now, with two of the _onmitsu_ already downed but the SHM fighting desperately. Yuffie had snapped the heel off of her shoe and revealed a small hidden dagger couched within the hollow compartment; she hadn't come completely unarmed. There was no hesitation on her part as she dodged a downward strike from an opponent and efficiently cut his throat open with the weapon – it was kill or be killed.

Vincent heaved himself off the ground and took a man down with an elbow strike to the face, then ducked a spurt of blood as Yuffie took out another enemy. "Watch the SUIT, Valentine!" Reno bellowed at him. "Get it dirty and I'll kill you!"

Glancing over his shoulder, Vincent saw that Reno had taken out two SHM already. The ex-Turk didn't try to stay standing but instead threw himself about in gymnastic lunges and rolls, using his arms to propel himself about while catching his foes in the face or neck or gut with his walking stick. The ones he struck didn't get back up. To his right Rei was keeping behind Makoto, who was moving in and out of the crowd with lightning-fast strikes, and whenever he hit someone the sound of breaking bones was audible.

Vincent took out another SHM that rushed him, sweeping low and repeating the maneuver he'd used on Lex, then kicking up with a follow-up strike that landed the point of his shoe right in the small of the man's back, damaging or at the most severing his spine. He turned to see if Rude needed help with Lex, just in time to see Rude slam the man against the wall and headbutt him, hard. Lex's eyes rolled up into his head and he telescoped down, unconscious.

Twenty seconds later, it was all over.


	13. Chapter XIII

"You need to learn to headbutt a bit less nastily," Yuffie chided Rude. "That Lex guy is sound asleep and probably won't be awake for a couple of days, at least according to the guys down at the hospital."

They were back at Yuffie's house, their numbers increased by one when Rude had decided to come rather than go back to where he'd been staying with Lex.

The bald ex-Turk shrugged as he leaned against the wall. "Can't help it if he's got a soft head." For his part, Rude sported a small, barely noticeable bruise on his forehead where he'd brained Lex, who had a massive, purpling wound.

"More like you have a hard one, partn- uh, Rude." Reno grinned and raised an imaginary glass to Rude from where he sat on one of the couches in Yuffie's den. "To the honored forehead."

"That was a terrible joke and you deserve to go to hell for it," Yuffie said, poking him and then curling up closer to his side.

Rude shrugged again and didn't answer Reno's salutation. Silence fell across the room for a minute and Vincent, from his position in the corner armchair, observed Reno and Rude. On the surface Reno was cheery enough, and on the surface Rude was unreadable enough, but he could tell the two men were uncomfortable in one another's presences.

Of course, it wasn't anything like what he felt anytime he looked at Reno's missing leg, but he remembered the incident well enough. Reno, confronted with the choice of having to live in Edge to work for the WRO – something Yuffie would not abide – or resign, had turned in his notice and gone to live with her in Wutai. Rude had taken it badly, as far as he _could_ take things badly. To say that Rude was a career-oriented individual was something of an understatement, and Reno's abandonment of his own career, not to mention his partnership with Rude, for Yuffie must have been a blow.

"So," Yuffie finally interjected into the silence. "Kind of a surprise to see you here. What with the cleanup and saying goodnight to Makoto and Rei after that scrap, we never asked – what the hell are you doing here? I thought you were working as CIC of all the WRO's military forces."

"Commander-in-chief is my post, but…" He trailed off for a moment, considering his next words. "I hope you'll all keep this secret."

"Of course," Vincent said before Yuffie or Reno could open their mouths.

"Reeve approached me personally. Said he was concerned about the SHM. Also said he needed Cloud here to run crowd control and that Cloud was too recognizable anyway. He asked me to try on a silver wig and told me it was perfect. I went ahead and transferred my position as CIC to him for the time being and got myself inducted into the SHM."

"You learn anything useful?" Reno asked.

"Being Lex's partner was the highest post I had. They don't tell anyone anything unless it's need-to-know. No way I'd advance further than where I was because I was pretending to be a mute on orders. Makes it easier to blend into the background, hear things I shouldn't hear. That didn't work, though; SHM don't talk much about sensitive stuff. Was going to leave anyway; this was a good time for you to get attacked."

"Just as well, because we've got our own spy now," Yuffie said. Rude raised an eyebrow at her and she elaborated, "The kid we got to help us bust the SHM in Rocket Town is named Terrence. We sprung him from the trap and let him go back to Edge to explain to his superiors what had happened. I just got a message from him today that he's been personally picked out by Commander Pan, whoever that is, for a special mission."

"Dear Diary," Reno laughed. "Jackpot."

Rude shook his head. "A month of WRO planning and two months of infiltration. And you outdo it in a few days."

"We try."

"There's something I don't understand," Vincent said to Rude.

"Big surprise," Yuffie teased.

"Why would you transfer your position as CIC to Reeve?" Vincent asked, ignoring Yuffie. "Doesn't he have enough responsibilities already as President? I'd think you'd have a subordinate you could give your position to while you were gone. And furthermore, how did you cover it up? CIC of all WRO regular military forces disappears, big mute guy shows up on the SHM's doorstep. Nobody raised an eyebrow?"

"Reeve just asked me to make him CIC as opposed to giving it to one of my subordinates," Rude replied. "Don't ask me why, I don't know."

"It just seems to me that him being President _and_ CIC is a dangerous amount of power for him to accumulate so suddenly. Not to mention that he's the one who personally asked you to go on this mission. Isn't that suspicious?"

"Why would Reeve be trying to circumvent the system he put in place himself?" Reno countered. "If he was power-hungry instead of well-intentioned he would have just made himself CIC and everything as President, not made it a separate position and given it to someone else. This is just a temporary thing."

"And as for my showing up on their doorstep the day after disappearing, it wasn't like that," Rude continued. "My leave of absence has been kept fairly secret. I don't think anybody besides Reeve and the planners behind the mission knows."

"True," Vincent said. "When I talked to Cloud, he said you were in command of the main WRO military, not that you had been until you went on a mission and gave command to Reeve. He might have just forgotten to mention that, but he did say he didn't have S-class clearance."

Rude frowned. "I haven't had any contact with Cloud, but I'd think he'd know."

"If he doesn't, it means that your mission is rated S-class secret, and somehow I doubt this warrants that extreme a level of secrecy – no offense to your sense of self-importance, Rude."

"None taken. You mean that a mission that had almost no chance to produce good results shouldn't rate S-class protection."

"Exactly. And if it was doomed to failure to begin with, why even bother implementing it? If it went through a month of planning, all the possible obstacles you could have and did run into should have been considered and ways around them planned out. The fact that there was no effort made to get you going to higher places just suggests to me that this was a double-bind."

Yuffie looked at him. "Double-bind?"

"In scientific terms it's a communicative paradox, but in Turk operations planning it refers to a mission that's by nature paradoxical. Say you were given an assignment to kill a popular political figure by strangling from behind with a fiber wire and to make it look like an accident."

"That might be a _bit_ impossible."

"Exactly. It seems to me that Reeve sent Rude on a classic double-bind. Get into the SHM, where by nature of their operation secrecy is necessarily paramount, and learn everything you can, _without being able to ask questions_. Everything points to Reeve wanting to be CIC of the WRO military."

"But you still haven't explained why," Reno reminded Vincent. "Reeve built up that army himself. If he wanted to be CIC, couldn't he have just asked Rude? I'm sure Rude wouldn't have said no if there was a good alternative post for him."

"Let's not try to account for the why just yet, Reno. I'm just making a list of things wrong within the WRO. There's this grab for CIC position by Reeve, and then there's the fact that the SHM are getting weapons from someone within the system, maybe even Reeve himself."

Rude jerked at that. "What?"

"When we busted the SHM unloading their stash in Rocket Town, it was all WRO-make weaponry. There was no third-party junk to be found, all of it was first-rate." Vincent started counting points off on his fingers. "Reeve sends Rude on a double-bind and happens to collect complete control of the military. Then the SHM suddenly start receiving shipments of weapons. Isn't it possible that Reeve could be ordering this weaponry diverted for 'storage' or 'retooling' or some other excuse? Am I the only one who sees this pattern?"

"Hole in your theory," Rude said. "The CIC has to make formal requisition requests for weaponry just like everybody else. If Reeve really wanted to help the SHM, he could do whatever he wanted with the weaponry after he _had_ it, but that leaves him two options. One, start diverting normal-level supply to the SHM, meaning there are shortages noticed within the ranks. That starts speculation. Two, start ordering increases of weaponry production, then ship off the increases to the SHM while maintaining the normal flow of materiel. Problem with number two is that he'd have to make a motion to the board in order to increase weaponry manufacturing, and that starts speculation too."

Vincent sat back in the armchair and mused for a moment. Yuffie took the opportunity to ask, "Vinnie, why are you so dead-set on assuming the worst? Maybe there was some screwup in the planning, maybe this amounts to nothing. Y'know? I'd rather think the best of Reeve. He's our friend, after all."

"I'd rather think the worst of him," Vincent countered, "and apologize when it turns out for the best. This way if it comes down to us versus him, at least we'll have anticipated it."

"I can't think like that, Vinnie. You're saying we should distrust an old friend, and a hero on top of that, on principle? That's bullshit."

"It's the way he was trained to think," Reno reminded her. "It's the way Rude and I were trained to think, too. Assume the worst. Don't let your guard down. Keep your friends and enemies equally close because the line can be blurry. If someone does something suspicious, get the real reason out of them. 'Because' isn't a proper answer. That kind of thing."

"Do you still think that way, Reno? Doesn't it ever get depressing?" Yuffie looked like she wanted to keep going, but she stopped for a minute and then considered her words before saying, "If I took all the money out of our joint account and disappeared overnight, no note, no messages or anything, what would you think?"

Reno looked pained. "I'd think," he replied, "that I was justified in putting some money aside in a Junon account just in case."

Nobody said anything. Yuffie stared at Reno as though transfixed, then shook her head and stood up suddenly enough to make Vincent involuntarily jolt. "Fuck it. I'm going to bed. Rude, you'll have to share the guestroom with Vincent. If you took the couch Reno wouldn't have anywhere to sleep." She crossed the den to the hallway and snarled over her shoulder, "Night."

Vincent looked at Reno, trying to gauge the man's reaction. The redhead sat there, eyes fixed on nothing, unconsciously fingering his walking stick.

"I wonder, Vincent," he finally said. "Have you done a lot of reading?"

"Some," Vincent replied.

"Well, doesn't really matter. I'm sure you've heard this quote before. 'He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.'"

He stopped staring into space and turned his gaze to Rude, then to Vincent. "D'you think that after so many years of doing the job, looking the other way when you have to, killing people who get in the way of the company, being suspicious… Can you ever become a normal human being again? Are we good and fucked forever?"

Vincent rose from his seat and quoted back, "'This is the _antinomy_: Insofar as we believe in morality we pass sentence on existence.'"

Reno looked at him, confused. "What does that have to do with…?"

"We adhere to a set way of thinking, which is essentially a set of morals," Vincent replied. "Through it we paint the world black and white. But not only do we tend to mix the extremes and make too many shades of grey, we end up painting ourselves." He turned and started towards the hall to the guestroom. "Does that kind of paint ever come off, Reno?"

"That's what I'm asking you."

He paused at the entrance to the hallway before continuing on in. "Depends on how hard you try to scrub it out."


	14. Chapter XIV

In retrospect, it was a good thing that Vincent had offered Rude the guestroom and taken to the roof to keep watch. He'd had an unpleasant feeling in his gut, and he'd learned to trust his instincts through the years.

Vincent's instincts had been spot-on; if he hadn't been keeping watch, all of them would have died.

The attack came at a tender three o'clock in the morning, when most of the town was absolutely dead. Obviously the SHM had somehow been informed of their comrades' failure, or perhaps that they hadn't been informed of victory told them all they needed to know.

Vincent was on the roof of Yuffie's house, staring out at the city and idly petting one of her many cats that had made its way up and settled in his lap. He'd changed out of Reno's ridiculous suit and had put on his normal clothes, sans his cloak, which he thought could use a run through the wash. The cat had sniffed a couple times at his gauntlet, which he'd grown accustomed enough to wearing that he'd put it back on despite the lack of necessity, and then had lost interest.

Black-clad figures began materializing out of the night, heading for the house. Vincent sat up straighter for a moment, then lightly brushed the cat off of him and went prone, hoping they hadn't seen him for the lack of stars or a moon to be silhouetted against; it was a dark night.

They hadn't. There were at least fifty of them, and all of them had guns this time. Vincent sighed and pulled Cerberus from his holster, quietly checking it by touch; he had sworn not to be caught unprepared again. It would have been so much easier and probably much safer to have stayed in Rocket Town or gone elsewhere than Wutai. This city held little in the way of fond memories for him.

The SHM surrounded Yuffie's house, bottlenecking all the exits and entrances. Vincent waited silently for the leader to show up. A mass like this had to have a commander for them to work with any kind of efficiency. The sounds of conflict would certainly wake everyone in the house and they could defend themselves from there; trying to wake them now was too risky, what with the enemy focused and ready.

_Time to change that, Valentine._

Another black-clad figure, a relatively smaller one, emerged from the crowd, but there was no mistaking the authority with which he strode, the aura of command he wore wrapped about himself like a cloak. This man was a leader, and a dangerous one at that.

He turned to start signaling to his troops, and Vincent sighted in on the back of the man's skull and fired.

Cerberus belched triple rounds that blew through the target's head like it was made of tissue paper. Immediately Vincent rolled down to the other side of the roof as the SHM roared and opened up, blasting roofing tile everywhere and bombarding the place where he'd been lying a moment ago. Lights came on inside the house and the SHM, obviously realizing that their cover had been blown, rushed inside.

Vincent snorted at their lack of tactics. Cramming all fifty of them into the house would be suicide. Everybody in there was easily capable of dispatching someone with a gun at close range, and in the narrow environment provided by the house the only way the SHM would be able to advance would be in ones and twos. It would just be a repeat of Rocket Town and the fight in the alley earlier that night, even if these were more highly trained and competent members of the cult.

He waited until most of them had crammed themselves inside, then leaped off of the roof and landed amongst the stragglers, taking out four with a spinning kick and then dispatching five more with pinpoint shots from Cerberus. The two that were left drew beads on him and one actually got a shot off before Vincent focused on the Fire materia he carried and blasted them both with gouts of flame. They hit the ground smoking and either unconscious or in shock.

A quick strike in from the rear and the SHM would be done for, what with being pressured from the front by their would-be victims. Vincent shucked the empty rounds from Cerberus, made to reload –

The weapon flew from his hand as someone landed a lightning-fast kick. Vincent staggered and instinctively turned his momentum towards his own retaliatory kick, striking blindly at the source of the attack. He jolted to a halt when the opponent caught his foot, whirled, and threw him like a rag doll.

The shed next to Yuffie's house stood up admirably to the impact of Vincent slamming into it. He hit the ground, rolled, came up in a fighting stance, and took two blows to the face that rocked him back before he even knew what was going on. _Concentrate! _Feint with his right, kick, kick got caught again, and as the opponent started to throw him again Vincent kicked off with his other foot and scythed the point of his boot into the enemy's neck.

His enemy dropped him like a sack of potatoes and Vincent rolled back, grabbing some space and taking the opportunity to finally get a look at the man.

There was no mistaking it: it was the commander whose head Vincent had so carefully removed from his shoulders not thirty seconds ago. The Silver-Haired Man rubbed his neck and grinned at Vincent, and that was when Vincent saw the blood soaking the man's leather uniform, undoubtedly from when his head had been blown off.

_That's impossible._

"Regeneration," the man said with a grin. "Marvelous ability, isn't it, Vincent Valentine?" He underscored Vincent's name with a lunge, drawing his fist back and then bringing it forward in a huge, easily-choreographed punch. Vincent didn't even give it a second thought; he pulled up his arm to block it and started looking for openings in the man's stance.

That was when the man's arm exploded – not literally, but it quadrupled in size, suddenly bulging with massive amounts of muscle, so much so that the sleeve of his leather jacket was torn to shreds. Vincent had no time to switch to a two-handed block; the punch crushed his arm into his chest and sent him flying back into the shed again, this time from a much closer point. The dent in the structure's wall got bigger.

Vincent's vision was swimming. This Silver-Haired Man… that punch had hit several times harder than the jackhammer blows the mako creature had been striking with. "Who the hell are you?" he demanded.

"Commander Pan, SHM," the man introduced himself. "When I got word that you and Kisaragi had arrived in Wutai, I immediately sent orders to Lieutenant Lex to neutralize you. Knowing that his chances were slim, however, I came here myself. After all, 'if you want something done…'"

Vincent nodded, barely listening. He catalogued the fact that Pan had been able to make the normally day-and-a-half trip from Edge in less than twelve hours; that meant the SHM had at least one ultralite troop carrier under their control and could get from the north pole to the south in less than a day. What he wanted to know was what this man was, exactly. Even Vincent wouldn't be able to regenerate his head if it was cut or blown off, yet this man had just done that. And the trick with his arm had been very real – the shreds of his leather jacket were lying strewn about him and his pale, slightly skinny arm was visible.

What the hell was this man?

"How did you do that?" Vincent asked, deciding on the direct approach. "I blew your head off."

"We have accounts of you regrowing lost limbs," Pan shot back. "It's nothing special."

"My limbs don't house my brain. I couldn't reconstruct that if I tried."

"I could explain it to you, Valentine, but you're not a scientist. You've only ever protected them – and your track record there isn't very good, is it?"

Vincent snarled at him, images of Lucrecia and Shalua Rui flitting across his mind before he closed them out. "Cute. You know a bit of my history. Did you come here to taunt me or to kill us?"

"Obviously the mission is a failure," Pan replied. "It became one the instant we lost the element of surprise, actually. You're a remarkably resilient fellow and I doubt I can properly kill you with just my bare hands. The rest of your friends are a tad more delicate, but I don't fancy what the odds will be when they get done with my troops."

"Cold words for a commander to casually drop about his men's lives," Vincent said. "Do you even care what happens to them?"

"There's no point in obsessing over it. I give them their orders; they carry them out or they die. There is no room for sentimentality in war. Yes, Vincent Valentine, that's precisely what this is. Consider this the declaration, if you like. When the dust clears, only the winners will remain… failures will not be tolerated."

Vincent eyed Pan. The man was obviously callous and cruel, but he wasn't stupid. There was obsessing over lost lives, and then there was being casual about their loss – not in the sense of being sad over human beings being snuffed out like so many candles, but in the sense of numbers. After tonight, the SHM were down almost a hundred men all told in Wutai. Why was Pan so unconcerned about that? He still had almost nine hundred in Wutai, if Makoto's figures were to be believed, but a hundred lost was a significant number.

Unless they had reinforcements of some kind incoming? Vincent would have to make sure to alert Makoto. Where was the man? Probably home, now that he'd seen to Lex's being ensconced in the Wusheng hospital…

A jolt of ice ran through Vincent's gut. _Lex. Oh, no._

Pan looked at Vincent and grinned crookedly. "I see the gears working, Valentine. I know what you're thinking. My colleague should be taking care of our erstwhile lieutenant as we speak. Pity he won't be of any use to you, eh?"

"Leave now," Vincent said. "If you know you won't be able to kill me, there's no point in our continuing to fight."

A horrible grin twisted Pan's face. "When I say 'properly,' Valentine, I mean _neatly_. I'll just have to get messy with you, won't I?"

There was a chance that the Wusheng guards at the hospital had been able to hold off whatever strike force Pan had sent, but it was doubtful. Vincent had to rush there immediately, and there was a rather large obstacle in his way.

So he did the only thing he could: he charged.

Vincent kept low to the ground, knowing straight-on kicks were going to be useless against Pan and his quick reflexes. He tossed a couple jabs with his right hand, watching Pan block or take them without issue. The man's eyes stayed firmly fixed on Vincent's gauntlet, which was the most damaging weapon in his arsenal at the moment.

Knowing it was a risk, Vincent feinted with his claw, a faux-thrust that Pan started to move to avoid. He chained it into a lightning crescent kick that started at the ground and terminated in a bone-cracking blow to Pan's chin, snapping his head back and breaking his neck so the vertebrae bulged against the skin of his throat.

Without looking, even with his neck snapped, another of Pan's rocketing punches impossibly took Vincent right in the gut as he began to recover from the kick. Vincent missed the shed completely and landed hard on his back some meters away, skidding before grinding to a halt on the asphalt. He gained his feet in time to see Pan pull his head back onto his spine, twist his neck a bit, and grin. Vincent resisted the urge to panic, his enemy's spine knitting itself together in his mind's eye. How could he have managed that punch if he'd been paralyzed from the neck down? Involuntary reflex?

Then Pan was on top of him, throwing lightning-fast punches from all directions, some of which Vincent managed to evade, others of which buffeted him like tidal waves crashing against the hull of a cruiser. Nothing fazed his enemy; he landed his fist square in Pan's face, leaving Pan's nose a broken mess, and Pan shrugged it off and hammered Vincent more, his nose grotesquely reforming itself until it was as though it had never been broken. Another neck-breaker kick of Vincent's missed its mark and Pan caught it, hauling Vincent off of his feet and holding the much taller man upside down, then twisting and hurling him over his shoulder to slam hard against the asphalt, keeping a hold on Vincent's ankle.

Vincent felt bones breaking, a particularly unpleasant sensation, and noticed that the asphalt had been all but pulverized into fine sand by his impact. The red haze lowered over his vision again and he started swiping wildly with his gauntlet, taking out both Pan's eyes, cutting open his throat, and then burying the golden talons deep in the man's chest in an attempt at his heart. Pan growled, pulled the gauntlet out of his chest, wrenched it off of Vincent's arm, and then slammed Vincent into the asphalt again.

"Don't you get it, Valentine?" he hissed as his eyes reconstituted themselves in their sockets. "I'm going to _break you._"

Vincent didn't bother to reply. The last impact had nearly knocked him unconscious, and Yuffie would doubtless be peeved about the twin craters in her driveway – _focus._ Focus mako, energy, Pan's face, mako, energy, Pan's face…

The Fire materia glowed from Vincent's right arm and a jet of flame, so intense that it was blue, erupted from Vincent's palm into Pan's face.

Terrible as he was, the SHM commander couldn't quite stand up to this. He shrieked and dropped Vincent, clutching at the charred mass that had been his face and staggering backwards. He crouched, almost as though he was gathering energy, and then both his legs exploded in the same way his arm had. Pan leapt fifty feet into the air and vanished from sight.

Vincent, broken and bleeding, managed to get to his feet, his body already beleagueredly reconstituting itself. He gazed in the direction where Pan had gone for a moment, and then remembered. _Lex. Dead meat._

He still had time, he was sure of it. Or at least he wanted to hope that. Staggering a bit, Vincent grabbed Cerberus, reloaded, then pulled his gauntlet back on and finally determined, somewhat blearily, in what direction the Wusheng hospital was.

That was when he saw the glow of a massive fire, complemented by the smoke rising from the area.

"Oh, shit."


	15. Chapter XV

There was no helping Lex. By the time Vincent got there, the captured SHM was dead as hell.

Vincent stared at the smoking remains of what had been the Wusheng hospital, which had serviced the Wusheng as well as many members of the populace. Whatever colleague of Pan's had been in charge of getting to Lex hadn't cared about anyone else in the building; he'd blown the shit out of it with a series of staggered charges that had collapsed the main support struts and worked its way up, causing the entire structure to telescope down into a flaming pyre.

He heard a fireman rushing by talking to his partner, and the death toll stood out in Vincent's mind like it was branded there. Total count: four hundred and eleven. At the least.

His still-healing knees gave out beneath him and Vincent collapsed to the ground, slamming his gauntleted fist into the pavement. "_Fuck _me," he growled. "Four hundred…"

He'd had reservations about Lex being put in the Wusheng hospital, wanting to keep him under guard in Yuffie's house instead. A lower-profile site, he'd suggested. The others had swayed him. What could the SHM possibly do? The hospital was well-guarded. There wasn't room in Yuffie's house. Vincent was just being paranoid.

_You let yourself be swayed, Valentine, _the voice sighed. _Didn't trust your instincts like you should. You should have insisted on Lex being guarded in Yuffie's house, not the hospital. Four hundred eleven, Valentine. Your fault. Your fucking fault._

"Shut up," Vincent snarled. "SHM's fault, not mine."

_SHM would have figured two birds with one stone if you'd had Lex moved to Yuffie's house. They would have sent just Pan and his strike team, and you would have crushed them both and you'd have your prisoner and four hundred and eleven innocent people would still be alive._

"SHUT UP!"

_Four hundred and eleven. You going to go and apologize to all their families personally, Valentine? You going to go beg for forgiveness for your enormous fuckup? You going to cry?_

"SHUT THE FUCK UP!" He flailed about, trying to block it out, and his gauntlet left furrows in the asphalt where it struck. Firemen and Wusheng officers kept well clear, not wanting to try to stop him.

_You're gonna cry, Valentine, just like you did when you fucked up with Lucrecia. When you fucked up with her, and the Rui chick, and Yuffie –_

Vincent smashed his head into the pavement and lay there, the blood pooling, staring at nothing. The dull ringing in his ears was much better company than the voice. Why did he do this to himself? Chaos being gone was a blessing, not a curse.

A better question might be: _was _he doing this to himself? Had he just convinced himself that this malignant voice was his own imagination and not something… something left over?

"Vinnie!"

It was Yuffie, still dressed in the ridiculous polkadotted pajamas that she stubbornly continued to wear even into her adulthood. Vincent stirred and pushed himself up to look at her, blood dripping into his eyes from the gash on his forehead he'd made.

She came to a halt next to him and knelt, looking at him with concern evident in her wide, storm-grey eyes. "What the hell happened to you, Vinnie? We heard you shoot at something, and then realized there were SHM outside… and when we finish them you're gone, my shed is about to fall over and there are two new craters in my driveway. Who were you _fighting?_"

"Pan," Vincent said around his uncooperative tongue. "Commander. Regeneration and something, I don't know, muscular enhancement. I blew his head off and he kept coming back." His stare went blank for a second and then he said, "Four hundred and eleven, Yuffie."

"Four hundred what?"

"Four hundred and eleven people. Dead." Vincent motioned listlessly at the burning remains of the hospital. "SHM blew the whole place to get to Lex. I should've made you and Makoto move him to your house."

"Vinnie, don't start the self-blame again. It's our fault for not listening to you." Desperate, Yuffie took hold of Vincent's shoulders and shook him. "Stop staring at me like that, dammit! Get up and help!"

For a moment it looked as though Vincent was just going to collapse again. Then he levered himself to his feet and drifted off towards where the Wusheng had set up an emergency command center, looking for all the world like a dark, lifeless apparition devoid of consciousness or impulse.

"Vincent," Yuffie murmured as she watched him go. "Please. Stop it. Don't take the world onto your shoulders."

From the way he was slumping as he walked, she was sure he didn't hear her.

* * *

Reno flipped his cell closed and looked across the den at Makoto, who had arrived a bare minute after the last of the SHM had been taken care of. Seated on the couch opposite Reno, he looked like a torn man, with no sleep to assuage his worries, wanting to be at the scene of the hospital attack and yet shamed in the knowledge that he would be in the way there. There were no more orders for him to give, nothing he could do that his countless subordinates on-scene couldn't. He clutched a shotglass in his right hand and a bottle of Wutainese brandy in his left.

"Well?" Makoto asked. "What's the situation?"

"Yuffie says that she, Rude, and Vincent are all on-scene and doing what they can to help, but it's not much. Right now all they're doing is piling bodies and moving rubble. Nobody could possibly have survived the explosion. No point in you going over there, Makoto."

Makoto nodded slowly, poured another shot for himself, and tipped back, a haggard look on his face. He swallowed noisily and then asked, "How many?"

Making sure to keep his expression neutral, Reno replied, "Yuffie says at the moment it's looking like four hundred and eleven."

The change in Makoto's features was so sudden it seemed almost supernatural. His eyes widened and flamed up, brow furrowed with rage, lips peeled back from his teeth, and he slammed the shotglass down on the coffee table in front of him so hard that it shattered. Reno said nothing; the table was already old and battered and the shotglass had been cheap.

"Four hundred and eleven," Makoto repeated, putting the brandy down on the table with exquisite care and staring balefully at the blood dripping from his right hand. "Those bastards have killed four hundred and eleven people." He squeezed his right hand into a fist and the blood began dripping down onto the carpet. Reno again said nothing, seeing as how the entire room was covered in blood and other signs of combat. Killing all the invading SHM had been a messy affair – they'd have to redo the entire interior of the house.

"Might want to heal that," Reno finally said after a long minute of silence.

"After a miscalculation like this, Reno, I wish I had been there. I wish I'd been killed instead of those people. This is nothing." Makoto rose and began to pace, and Reno could swear he heard the man's teeth grinding. "I should have listened to Vincent. He was talking sense, dammit."

"You had confidence in your men," Reno countered. "You didn't think they'd try anything tonight, either, not after the fight at the alleyway. It's not your fault, Makoto."

"Don't try to alleviate blame, Reno, because this is very much my fault. I actually _did_ think the SHM might try something tonight, but I was afraid of putting all of you at risk, so I thought the hospital would be safer. I let my personal feelings influence my judgment and now four hundred and eleven people are dead." He pounded a fist against the wall, quaking with anger. "I suppose that Lex wasn't joking. If these SHM want a war, I'll give them one like they've never seen."

Reno raised an eyebrow but again refrained from comment. He'd never seen Makoto this angry before.

"I swear," Makoto snarled, looking directly at Reno now. "On the blood of all those innocent people, I swear that I'm not stopping until every last Silver-Haired Man within Wutai is dead or stripped of their membership and punished!"

"Go heal your hand, Makoto," Reno said. "Be practical about this. But… that whole punishment thing – sounds good to me."

Makoto nodded and new determination blazed in his eyes. "I'm heading to HQ to start organizing this. I have to do something besides break shotglasses and make oaths, after all."

"Precisely. Knock 'em dead."

The Wusheng leader disappeared out the front door and Reno gave a long sigh, then eyed the brandy on the table, leaned forward, and took a long swig. _Good shit._

He put the bottle back down and got up, hobbling back to his and Yuffie's room. When Yuffie had first shown him the gift from Cid, he'd been somewhat leery. Using it would involve painful surgery and physical therapy, but after this debacle Reno knew it had really been decided for him. He couldn't stand back and watch his friends go fight without him.

The box was where he'd left it. Reno opened it and gazed at Cid's little masterpiece with a sense of fate overtaking him.

Then he realized he would have to write a thank-you note to the old coot. _Goddammit._

* * *

Vincent was moving through the endless stacks of bodies, limbs already stiffening in grotesque mockeries of state, when he saw it, or rather _him_. It was Terrence, sprawled out on the pavement next to a pair of dead women, and the SHM was still breathing. His hair was matted with blood and he had a large lump rising on the side of his head, but he looked otherwise fine.

Too numb inside to muster anything but morbid curiosity, Vincent took the direct approach and nudged the young man with the toe of his boot until he stirred. He looked at Vincent and started, then clutched at his head. "Mr. Valentine? Dammit, my head hurts."

"I bet it does," Vincent said flatly. _Four hundred and eleven, Valentine – shut up_, he thought. "What are you doing here? I thought you were going to be our mole."

Terrence groaned and sat up. "Commander Pan – yeah, I remember now. He wanted me to be _his _mole. He had one of his lieutenants hit me and leave me here, and I was supposed to tell you that I tried to stop the attack because I've had a change of heart or something. He was hoping you'd take me in and try to grill me and I could feed you misinformation, maybe even get attached to you and keep him abreast of your plans."

A fairly standard tactic, but something bothered Vincent. He tried to put a finger on it, then found it wasn't the situation – it was Terrence's tone, his reaction to the carnage around him. He'd already proven himself to be a coward and a sneak, and Vincent was little inclined to like him. "And?" he asked. "Would you really have had a change of heart when you saw that this is what the SHM are capable of?"

Terrence shrugged. "I can't get a decent job and the SHM pay better than anybody else once you get up in the ranks and start doing real work for them. It's not my fault if the ones in charge are psychos."

The blameful emptiness in Vincent instantly filled up with rage. He grabbed Terrence by the collar and hoisted him up, fury blazing in his crimson eyes. "Is that it, then?" he snarled. "Is that all this is to you? A paycheck? You are working for people who would kill hundreds of innocents to get to a single target! How can you not be ashamed?"

"Put me down, dammit! I'm going to help you, aren't I?"

"THIS DOESN'T MAKE YOU ANGRY?" Vincent roared at him. "PEOPLE ARE DEAD!"

"Who the hell cares?" Terrence retorted, his own anger rising.

Vincent saw red and the next thing he knew he'd thrown Terrence to the asphalt, ground a foot into his throat, and had Cerberus halfway out of its holster before he managed to arrest the impulse to kill the little shit where he lay. All the boy's uses – misinformation, covert activities, native SHM infiltration – paled, curled up, and died in the face of his utter, apathetic inhumanity.

Working very hard to restrain himself, Vincent removed his foot from Terrence's neck. "Get the fuck up," he said, deadly quiet, "and go away. You sold out all your comrades to save your own skin and only cooperated with us as a spy because you knew what'd happen if you didn't. How could I possibly think you'd be useful to us? I must be insane."

"But I can –"

"I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU CAN OR CAN'T DO!" Vincent screamed at him, all his composure lost. "FOUR HUNDRED AND ELEVEN PEOPLE DIE FOR NO REASON AND YOU DON'T CARE AS LONG AS YOU GET PAID? I SHOULD KILL YOU RIGHT NOW!"

Terrence didn't try to protest after that. He scrambled to his feet and fled. Vincent stared blearily at his retreating back and bile rose in his throat. "THAT'S RIGHT!" he screamed again at the boy. "GO BACK TO THEM! IF I EVER SEE YOU AGAIN, I'LL KILL YOU! I SWEAR IT!" His knees gave out again and he barely managed to catch himself before he fell face-forward in the blood and rubble surrounding him. "BASTARD!"

The rage left him and he quaked for a moment before he forced himself back to his feet and returned Cerberus to its holster. He felt Yuffie's approach before he heard it and he turned to see the ninja-girl covered in blood and soot, sadness and hesitancy in her eyes.

No words came, so Vincent just stumbled towards her. Something caught his foot and he began to totter again, but Yuffie moved forward and caught him up in her embrace, her relatively tiny body effortlessly supporting his much larger frame. He went limp against her and heaved silent sobs into her shoulder as they stood together in the midst of what was surely the end of the world.


	16. Chapter XVI

Hey, everyone. Been a while since I've left an authornote. I just wanted to thank all of you for your reviews and attention thus far, and tell you the reason updates have slowed to a crawl is, in a word, college. Love it, but it keeps me busy. No worries though, I fully plan to conclude this particular story. It just might take a while. Without further thematics, then, Chapter XVI.

* * *

The WRO Tower, set in the dead center of Edge, was busy at all times of the day. Right now, though, it was at its peak level of activity as people were returning from their lunch breaks or patrols, getting ready to begin what most less-than-affectionately referred to as the "afternoon grind."

For Cloud, that was usually when the day began. Being head of a section that technically didn't exist meant he couldn't really be held accountable for when he showed up at work, so he slept in late and came whenever he pleased, usually around one or two o'clock. Everyone knew him, of course, and while nobody in the lower departments knew precisely what his job was, he was always greeted by somewhat-jealous WRO members when he showed up rested and full of energy when they had been working for four to five hours already.

Daniel was one such lower-placed member, a worker in the records department of the tower. Cloud stepped into an elevator with him and punched the top floor, then gave his best pleasant smile – which for Cloud was somewhere between a horrible faux-smile and an embarrassed grin – and said, "Afternoon."

"Cloud, afternoon," Daniel replied. He was of Wutainese descent and Cloud was fairly sure he had relatives or parents still living in the city, so he wasn't surprised when Daniel asked, "Did you hear about what happened in Wutai yesterday?"

"No, I didn't. Was it something serious?"

Daniel nodded grimly. "The SHM have basically declared open war on the city. One of their lieutenants was captured by the Wusheng and put in the hospital for recuperation before questioning, right? The entire building was blown up. Four hundred-something innocent people died in the blast. And Shigeru Makoto, head of the Wusheng, and Kisaragi Yuffie were reportedly attacked during the night by elite units. They made it out alive, but it's a mess over there."

Cloud's eyes widened. This was one of the disadvantages to sleeping in, he supposed: he was always the last to hear about these things. "I'll have to look into this. Thanks, Daniel."

"Sure." The man exited the elevator a moment later and Cloud made sure nobody else was coming, then keyed in his command override to make it head for his office without stopping. A moment later he stepped into the too-spacious room and went to the solitary desk in its center, sat himself down, and pulled out his phone.

He could call Yuffie, but it would still be extremely early in the morning in Wutai, so he decided to call Vincent instead.

The phone got to three rings before someone picked up, and it was definitely not Vincent. A deep, familiar voice answered instead. "Hello?"

"Rude?" Cloud asked with some understandable surprise. "What are you doing up so early and why do you have Vincent's phone?"

"I'm jogging. Early morning air, you know. Relaxing. Vincent's gone, don't know where. He left his phone, I thought I'd hold onto it for him. I don't think he wanted us to follow him."

Cloud was about to ask why, but then his mind leaped two steps ahead and it made sense. He swiveled around in his chair and stared at the far wall where he had up a picture of Tifa, a lovely smile on her face. "He took it hard?"

"He felt like he was responsible for all the death, I suppose. Anyway, there's nothing we can do about it now. We know he's still in Wutai. I can only assume he wanted to go and do something in his own element."

"You're sure he didn't go back to the Nibelheim mansion?"

"Yuffie burnt it down, for one. For two, he left a note. 'Don't worry. I'll be back in a few days.'"

Cloud sat up a bit straighter when he heard that the old mansion was gone. No loss to anyone, he guessed, but he couldn't picture Nibelheim without that looming building jutting up in front of the mountains. Not that he wanted to go back. "He took his gun?"

"If he left it, we can't find it."

"He'll be fine, then. Question, though. You're obviously not undercover anymore. Did you tell them what was really going on with that?"

"Vincent brought it up himself, actually. Just suspicious, but he was dead-on. They kind of had a fight about it, though."

This particular matter was dwelling heavily on Cloud, so he just rubbed his temples with his spare hand and nodded for a moment. Security leaks, interdepartmental reconfiguration with little to no reason given as to why, various other suspicious activities… The WRO was not as pure an organization as Cloud had once envisioned it would be.

Reeve was especially worrying him. Everything seemed to link back to him, so Cloud and Rude had come up with the plan of dropping word down secure pipelines in Cloud's division that he wanted a volunteer for someone to infiltrate the SHM. Nobody except him – and Rude, of course – should have known, yet Reeve had known and had come to Cloud to suggest Rude for the job. Cloud, to allay suspicion of his own suspicion, had agreed, and the next day Rude was gone and his position as CIC of the WRO military had been transferred to Reeve.

It was the latest item on a very long list that was making Cloud wonder about what the hell Reeve was doing.

"You made sure not to mention that I had a hand in it?" he finally asked.

"But you didn't, officially. You just were brought into Reeve's confidence on that."

"I didn't tell Vincent you'd been sent on the mission just in case he ran into you and it might compromise you if he gave any sign of knowing you were someone else. Vincent probably caught that the mission was a double-bind, right?"

"He did."

If there had to be fighting, Cloud vastly preferred open, honest fighting to all this double-dealing and deception, but he had no choice. He couldn't tell his friends of his suspicions, because Reeve would suspect him of disloyalty – if things came to that, of course. "Just do me a favor and keep them in the dark on that. If they want to think I've abandoned them, that's fine. I'll be there when it counts."

"Of course. I'll keep in touch, Cloud."

"Luck, Rude." The phone clicked and the conversation had never taken place.

There was a knock at Cloud's office door and he started, swiveling around in his seat. A lump settled firmly in his gut; he'd left it open and Cait Sith was standing right there, leaning on it and looking at him.

He didn't often see Reeve these days. The only time it wasn't Cait Sith he spoke with was when they had a top-level board meeting. Two years ago there had been an assassination attempt on Reeve by unknown parties and since then his security had enforced a strict procedure of him only taking Cait Sith out unless his own presence was crucial – even in his own building.

If Cloud opened by asking Cait Sith how long he'd been standing there, that would set off alarm bells in anyone's head. "Took me by surprise, Reeve."

Cait Sith shook its head and strolled into Cloud's office. "You're losing your touch, Cloud. Can't get soft, y'know."

"Of course. Can I help you?"

"Maybe. That was Rude you were on the phone with, right?"

The lump in his gut tripled in mass and Cloud fought to keep from sweating. He kept his expression neutral. Honesty was the best course if Reeve knew everything already. "Yes, actually." He didn't elaborate; let Reeve connect the dots and show how much he knew.

Cait Sith played the game unwittingly. "How's it going?"

Obviously Reeve didn't know that Rude's cover was blown. If he'd been tapping into the conversation wirelessly it would have been very clear to him that Rude was out in the open by now. That meant he'd made a guess and happened to have gotten it right. Cloud resisted the urge to swear; he could have said he was calling Tifa or Marlene or anyone but Rude if he'd known that. Cait Sith was impossible to read when it came to these things. "Well," Cloud lied smoothly. "He was out jogging alone, good time for us to communicate."

"Mm. Can't let the SHM know we're onto them, eh? You heard about Wutai."

"I did. I'm going to try to get as much info as possible on it."

"I have my sources who are already telling me that Vincent was there."

Cloud felt the robot's black eyes focus just a bit harder on him. He assumed an appropriate expression of surprise. "Vincent? I thought…"

"He's up and about again, Cloud. Yuffie probably went to ask him to help her with the SHM in Wutai. Kind of ironic, don't you think?"

That statement hit Cloud like a strike to the face. Reeve, laughing about the irony of Vincent going to help with the SHM and arriving just in time to have them blow up a hospital in his face? This was wrong. "Couldn't say. I don't go much for poetic device."

"Of course not. Listen, I need you to do me a big favor. We could use Vincent a great deal against the SHM here, too. Could you go to Wutai and help him resolve the situation there? That way he – and Yuffie, too – could come here and help _us _out."

Here it came. "Of course," Cloud said. "Let me go ahead and get together a meeting of some of my subordinates, see which one of them would like to take over for me while I'm gone, and then I'll –"

"No need for that," Cait Sith assured him smoothly. "I can take over your administrative duties in your absence, don't worry."

Reeve had made his pitch and Cloud couldn't do anything but accept unless he wanted to look suspicious. He could try the concerned angle, though. "Are you sure? You're already subbing for Rude as CIC, which is awfully generous of you. I may come in at one in the afternoon, but I do my fair share of work – field work, too."

"I'm sure we won't be needing you too much in the field until we start moving against the SHM in force, Cloud, and I can easily take care of your administrative duties too. Being president is actually an easier job than you would think."

Shit. Concerned angle complete failure. He could try to stall. "Well, let me go ahead and get my stuff together. I'll leave the day after tomorrow." Maybe if he had that extra day, he could get his subordinates together, the trustworthy ones, and confide his suspicions in them –

"No time, Cloud. You'll see the reports soon enough, it's a war zone over there. The sooner we resolve this, the better. Too, Wutai may not be willing to be subordinate to the WRO, but a friendly hand in a time of need is always welcome. This could be the beginning of a wonderful alliance. I want you to leave this evening, no later. Go ahead and take the day to get ready, say goodbye to Tifa, and such."

"All right then, Reeve. I'm trusting you with this." A risky jibe, but it could work, get Reeve to show more of his hand.

"No worries there, Cloud. I'll take care of everything."

Cloud offered him another pleasant smile, aware of exactly how sickly it looked. _Yeah, I bet you will._ "Great. Be seeing you, then."

"Oh, and Cloud, one more thing. Don't tell anyone, even Tifa, that you're going to Wutai. Just say I need you down in, oh, Junon for a few days. I don't want the SHM getting any wind of this whatsoever and intercepting your ride. After all, this office is safe, but we've had a lot of security leaks lately."

And how many of them had he been the cause of? "Right," Cloud said. "No problem, Reeve. Goodbye." He got up out of his desk and left his office, headed for the elevator.

He waited until he was safely on the Fenrir, two blocks from the WRO building, before he swore and permitted himself to wonder what had happened to one of his best friends.


	17. Chapter XVII

"You know I don't usually travel these days," the man said as he settled himself into the seat Vincent offered him. "I hope you realize that the only reason I'm here is because you happened to mention business in your message."

"I'm eminently aware of that, Deman," Vincent replied, taking a seat himself. They were in a corner of the Drunken Fisher King. It was a popular Wutainese bar, but not one so high-class as to elicit suspicious glances from the clientele when someone as strange as Vincent walked in. He'd left his gauntlet in a secure spot, knowing how it made him stand out, but he'd retrieved his cloak before he'd left.

The man across from him had something of a history. Deman Jobs, ex-Turk and Vincent's former partner of decades ago. He was quite old now, almost seventy, but he still had a healthy, if somewhat devious, air about him. If the concept of bland had a face, it would have been his. His features were utterly unremarkable, his graying hair normal, his frame neither particularly tall or broad nor short or skinny enough to be noticeable. He was every covert operations planner's dream agent, except for the one detail that was out of place: his small, dark eyes glittered with a powerful intelligence that belied the normality of his exterior.

"So," Deman said, leaning back a bit in his seat. "What do you want with your old partner, Vincent? I thought we had spoken for the last time during the aftermath of that debacle that was supposed to be Kisaragi's wedding."

"And I thought I had told you to quit your mercenary work in favor of settling down somewhere and leading an honest life," Vincent chastised him drily. "Yet I go to some of my old sources and put in a request for an information broker and look who shows up."

"A man has to keep busy," Deman protested. "Besides, I don't think you honestly expected me to purposefully put myself out of the know just because I'm retired."

"No, I suppose I didn't."

"I heard about what happened at the hospital. Not that anyone hasn't, but I offer my condolences."

"I'm grateful," Vincent muttered. That was why he was here, after all. Whoever the bastard was that had cracked the hospital like an eggshell and then scattered the proverbial yolk over a two-block radius, he was going to find him and make him wish he'd never been born.

And the very debacle the man had caused was to be his undoing, ironically enough. Reaching into his cloak, Vincent withdrew what to any normal eye would appear to be a bit of charred circuitry. "Take a look at this."

Deman leaned forward, squinting. "Well, now. I don't keep up with explosives nowadays –"

"How likely," Vincent sneered.

"– but I'd say this bears a remarkable resemblance to a detonator. A model A78 class C high explosives detonator, to be exact."

"And who makes A78 CC HEDs, Deman?"

"The WRO, of course. Not a big surprise to me that the SHM would have these – after your little crackdown in Rocket Town I got all sorts of interesting information about the types of weaponry that the freaks had supposedly gotten their hands on."

"I'm not sure what's going on, and frankly I doubt it's a good idea to tell you everything, but what I _will_ tell you is that I'm fairly sure that Tseng is behind this." Vincent omitted any mention of Reeve. His old friend could be dealt with later; right now, his suspicions rested on Tseng. "The last time I checked, there's only one factory in the world that manufactures A78 CC HEDs."

"There are actually two," Deman said blithely. "One of them is right here in Wutai and technically doesn't exist. The other, though, is in Edge, under the direct control of Mr. Tseng's office." He leaned back in his seat and threaded his fingers together, lips pursing for a moment in thought. "I suppose you've already considered the possibility that Mr. Reeve might be behind this and Mr. Tseng is either unaware or just following orders?"

"There's too much bureaucracy in the way of Reeve directly requisitioning these things for it to be him," Vincent replied. "We're worrying about him later. I'm fairly sure that Tseng is doing this by himself, and I'm also fairly sure that he's not seditious. He just needs money."

"He isn't getting paid enough?"

"It's not for him. It's for Elena."

Deman nodded. "Of course. If I recall correctly, the lady has been sick for some time. There are rumors that she has an advanced case of delayed-action Geostigma, actually."

"No, I doubt it's that. Tseng is in a position where he could go ahead and get her treated with Lifestream extract for the stigma with a snap of his fingers. I think she's got a disease to which there's no known cure… except, perhaps, an illegal and very costly one."

The information broker closed his eyes. "I know of many types of incurable diseases, but only one of those has a costly and highly illegal treatment. Let's see if we're thinking the same thing." He produced a pen from his pocket, grabbed a napkin, and wrote something on it, then flipped the napkin over and handed it and the pen to Vincent. "Go ahead, I'm not looking."

Somewhat amused at Deman's theatrics in spite of the seriousness of the moment, Vincent wrote his suspicion on the napkin, then put it in the middle of the table and unfolded the bit of paper.

Both sides of it clearly said "mako overdose."

"I think we're agreed, then," Deman observed. "About three months ago, if I'm correct in assuming that's how long Ms. Elena has been ill, she was somehow given a massive overdose of mako exposure and her system was thrown into chaos by the experience. Now Mr. Tseng, desperate to keep her alive, is covertly selling off these weapons to the SHM or some other source that is then supplying the SHM with said weapons. With the money he gets, he gets Ms. Elena the one thing that can keep her alive, albeit at great cost." He put the pen back in his pocket and slid the napkin aside. "Mako baths."

Vincent's lip curled at the idea. "No wonder nobody's seen her. I can only imagine what three months of mako bathing has been doing to her." With no direct access to the Lifestream, Tseng had to be buying massive amounts of pure mako runoff from whoever was looking to sell the countless stores of the stuff that Shin-Ra had built up over its long lifetime. "And he's having to go and buy the mako from third-party sources because mako harvesting is illegal for obvious reasons for one. For two, if he made some great deal of seizing all the old stockpiles that Shin-Ra had amassed and then bits of it started disappearing… well."

"Precisely. It wouldn't go unnoticed. What he's doing now hasn't gone unnoticed as it is." Deman blew out a sigh. "So, then. What do you need me for?"

"I need to get in contact with Tseng. He's sealed himself off from all outside contact except through WRO sources and I have no access to those. I need you to give me some way to get a message that he'll listen to through to him. I'm sure you know of a way."

Deman grinned. "I might. In fact, I think you should come with me, Vincent."

Vincent looked at the man. "What? We haven't ordered yet."

"You can buy me dinner later. For now I think we have a place to be in less than an hour, and we wouldn't want to miss this particular meeting."

"Are you toying with me, Deman?"

"Of course not, Vincent. I expect to be well-rewarded for what I'm about to deliver you, that much is true, but I'm also doing this for an old friend in need of aid. I anticipated that you'd be wanting to get in contact with Tseng."

"And…?"

"Follow me and you'll see."

* * *

They walked for nearly an hour in complete silence. Vincent didn't try to ask where Deman was leading him, and Deman never offered any explanation. This was of little concern to Vincent. He could easily find his way back to wherever he needed to go no matter where Deman took him, and it was his old partner's nature to be secretive.

So he kept his peace and followed.

It was a full hour of walking before they finally came to their destination, which seemed like the middle of nowhere. They stood on a dark side street that branched off into a multitude of alleyways.

Still Deman said nothing, instead stepping into one of the alleys and motioning for Vincent to do the same. Moving with the silent grace of his training, Vincent acquiesced and hid himself. _This had better be worth it, _the voice snarled. _He's been stringing you around. He's probably got an ambush coming for you even as we speak._

_Shut up, _Vincent told the voice automatically.

They were not long waiting. Two minutes later, a lone, cloaked and hooded figure appeared at the far end of the street, coalescing out of the shadows in the same absolute silence through which Deman and Vincent moved. Here was someone dangerous, and Vincent had a pretty good idea who it was.

Deman tapped Vincent on the shoulder and then signed at him in the old Turk combat signaling. _One. One more. Alive._ One more person was coming and they needed to take both intact.

As if on cue, the second figure materialized. It, too, was cloaked, but not hooded, and Vincent saw in the bit of moonlight a flash of silver hair.

Deman signaled. _Now._

Before either of the figures could speak, Vincent snapped up Cerberus and fired three times, a bullet sparking off of the ground between both their feet and the third landing on the pavement between them. The hooded and cloaked one started but did nothing, wisely enough.

The SHM was different. He whirled, arm reaching into his cloak for what was clearly a weapon.

Vincent gave him time to clear the weapon from his cloak – it turned out to be a large pistol of a caliber clearly intended to blow limbs off – before he switched to a three-round burst. Cerberus spoke and the other man's gun, plus two of his fingers, ceased to exist as such. He screamed and fell to his knees, the motion dislodging something from the innards of his cloak. It fell to the ground with the sound of breaking glass and something began to glow in the darkness of the night.

He and Deman strode out of the alleyway towards the two other men. "Well, well," Deman said. "Surprising what you pick up in this line of business. A covert meeting, and in Wutai, yet – under the very noses of the Wusheng who are now dedicated to the total extermination of the SHM! I wonder what could have made you decide to meet here."

"The message I got said to," the cloaked figure said in a flat, dead tone. "And I was wondering why they wanted me to come here. You somehow tapped or modified a secure transmission."

"I may be old, but I have my ways."

Vincent ignored the SHM and the glowing pool of mako on the pavement in favor of going to the first man. He pushed the hood back to reveal Tseng, looking haggard and angry but resolute.

"Tseng."

"Vincent, long time no see. Somehow I don't feel surprised that it was you that caught me."

"Why, Tseng?" Vincent demanded. "Why would you stoop to clandestinely trading with and aiding this filth?"

"I think you already know. Three months ago, there was… there was an accident." His resolution slipped and Tseng's face crumpled. He squeezed his eyes shut and bowed his head, taking a deep breath before continuing. "Elena came out of it badly damaged, but she was still alive. It was almost like what Tifa described of her experiences with Cloud when he was comatose from a mako overdose, except Elena wasn't going to get better. Unlike Cloud, who had been exposed to mako before and had built up something of an immunity to its effects, Elena felt the full impact of the accident and became dependent on it."

Vincent nodded. Cloud, who been exposed to a certain degree of mako in order to augment his capabilities, was capable of harnessing it for use without causing himself physical harm. Someone with no prior exposure, like Elena, being massively overdosed on it would become entirely dependent on it for months or even years. In mako detoxification, there was no such thing as going cold turkey. That would kill an overdose subject sure as if they were shot through the head.

Shot through the head…

Something metaphorically exploded in Vincent's mind. The SHM, stealing mako creatures out of the Nibelheim reactor. Elena's mysterious "accident." Obviously it was no coincidence that they had the supplies that Tseng needed to keep her alive, and it was quite possible that they were behind the whole thing, but this tie between them and the mako creatures put a new perspective on the problem. "Deman," Vincent started to ask, "what do you know about –"

He didn't get to finish. Something slammed into him, something that hit hard and was definitely not Tseng. He spun, tried to right himself, failed when his feet were swept out from under him. His attacker leaped on top of him, pinning him to the ground. In the back of his mind Vincent realized that Deman was cursing and going for his piece, the SHM was trying to take the opportunity to flee, and Tseng was making negative motions, but the only thing that he occupied his attention with was the face of the thing that stared down at him where he lay on the asphalt.

_Elena?_


	18. Chapter XVIII

"_But we don't know if we can get through to him as he is," Mary protested. "I don't think we should be taking this shut-down state of Richard's lightly."_

_Michael steadfastly ignored her and continued plugging wires into the back of the head of the unconscious cyborg form on the lab table. "We don't know what made him this way. Trauma, a virus, some kind of attack… it really could be anything. I have to go in and review his last memories, see if I can establish what exactly put him to sleep so well."_

"_I really, _really _don't think that's wise. You go in there, you might never wake up either. And I'm not bailing you out if that happens, I'm just warning you it might."_

_By way of reply Michael showcased her a cocksure grin and climbed onto the table adjacent to Richard's, then felt for the familiar connectors in the back of his own head and plugged himself in, ignoring the cold, penetrating sensation as he did so. "Fire her up, Mary."_

"_You dumbass, don't you realize what you're walking into? I'm telling you –"_

"_I'm telling _you _to fire it up, thanks. Or are you going to start disobeying orders now?"_

_For the first time, concern flashed through Mary's aquamarine optical implants, but it was quickly banished in favor of flat resignation. "Fine. It's been nice knowing you, Mike."_

_She keyed in a command sequence and the world zoned out, became flashing lights and pixels, draining down into an infinitesimal nothing that ended and expanded out the back of Richard's skull and Michael was inside_

"Commander Pan?"

Pan felt his eye twitch as he put down the pen and looked up at the nervous young man standing in front of him. "I gave explicit orders not to be disturbed unless there was an emergency. Unless we have Wusheng pouring through the front door of our cozy little subterranean bunker, I don't want to hear it."

"It _is_ an emergency, sir. The Wusheng aren't here, but they're on the move – they're sweeping through the slums. Sectors nine through twelve, to be precise."

_Shit. _ That was were Pan had had the majority of the latest heavy-weaponry shipment secreted for later use. It had minimal guards on it in favor of keeping up steady terrorist actions in other districts and would be an easy snatch for the Wusheng if they stumbled upon it. "Are they moving purposefully? Do we know they're looking for the weapons?"

"No, sir, but they're doing a very thorough sweep. Tactical thinks that this was a random choice on their part of where to perform a search and that they just got lucky."

"Their fortune is our ruin if they get that heavy-weaponry shipment. Go and tell tactical to dispatch five squads immediately. They're to get the shipment out of there at all costs and get it here."

The young SHM knew better than to protest the fact that slum sectors nine through twelve were more than five miles away from their current location. He was also apparently too limited to realize that Pan's choice also meant that the Wusheng could just follow the breadcrumb trail here, revealing the SHM's secret command center for the action against Wutai.

So he just saluted and scuttled away.

Pan waited a beat, then hit the button on his desk for the intercom. "Lieutenant Nero?"

"Here," replied a crisp voice. "How can I help, Commander?"

Nero was an able enough soldier, good at following orders if not too bright. He was a demolitions expert and had been responsible for the wonderful job on the hospital. He was also trustworthy, unlike the vast majority of the SHM ranks here in Wutai. Pan reflected for moment on the miserable failure that Terrence had been at espionage and took a moment to curse Valentine for not taking him into the fold, finding out he was a spy, and then killing him. It would have saved Pan a lot of work.

Oh, well. Not much else to do except send him to the labs. Pan made a mental note to complete that particular reassignment as soon as they were done with this particular action. "One of the marks is going to come with orders from me to dispatch five squads to move the heavy-weaponry shipment out of slum sectors nine through twelve and bring it back to base. Acknowledge the order, then wait until he leaves before dispatching the decoy squads to the ambush site we've set up in sector thirteen. I expect the Wusheng will be in for a surprise."

"Acknowledged. Anything else?"

"Yes. Watch our communications grid. Once our little traitor's sent off a message that we're going to move the shipment to our command center, detail a pair of troops to bring him here. I need some exercise."

"Understood, sir. Nero out."

Pan killed the intercom and picked his pen back up. Traitors and warfare and killing and so much to do. It made finding time to write extremely difficult.

_The first thing Michael noticed about Richard's dataspace was that it was warped…_

* * *

"Elena, it's Vincent!"

Vincent fought to keep his combat reflexes down. Elena crouched on top of him, face inches from his, eyes glowing with mako and insanity. The mako baths had been changing her, all right – not so much yet that he was afraid the effects were irreversible, but it might come to it at that. What had once been smooth skin had turned waxy and pale, and her muscles stood out like bunched whipcords in her legs and arms.

But her eyes cleared a bit when Tseng shouted that it was Vincent, and she looked at him for a moment before swiftly getting off of him. "Sorry."

Vincent pulled himself back to his feet and brushed himself off. He looked at Elena again, this time more closely. She was also wearing a dark cloak like Tseng, but she had abbreviated the bottom into a not-quite-knee-length skirt and had cut the sleeves short at the elbows. Her frame still bore some resemblance to its former willowy self, but he could see the hard steel beneath her almost translucent skin. Her eyes glowed even more brightly than Cloud's.

"Long time no see," she said.

"Yeah," Vincent agreed, holstering Cerberus. He looked over at Deman, who was also holstering his piece while keeping an eye on the SHM, who had tried to flee in the confusion and had earned a kick to the nose for it. "You all right over there?"

"Of course. I hope Ms. Elena didn't injure _you_."

"As though." Vincent turned his gaze back to Tseng. "All right, Tseng, enough's enough. I know all things mako are illegal, but I'm sure Reeve could have done something for Elena. Why didn't you take her to him for treatment?"

Tseng's mouth twisted into a grimace. "We couldn't do that because we're not sure we can trust Reeve any more, Vincent. Me, Cloud, Rude – we've had suspicions for a while now, about the way Reeve's been acting and managing things. I'm sure they were pretty mum on my situation, what little they know of it, because I've kept Elena's condition secret even from them, but we've been trying to figure out exactly what's up with Reeve for a while now."

"And is it any coincidence, then, that Rude was sent off on a double-bind mission and you're being put in the perfect position to get sacked for illegal activities? I bet Reeve's going to find some way to get rid of Cloud any day now."

"Maybe he's suspicious, yes. I don't know. But I couldn't take Elena to Reeve because the accident occurred while we were in a restricted area, trying to gain access to a secret WRO lab. We thought Reeve might have something unsavory going on in there, and the next thing we knew Elena was nearly drowned in mako. It was all a blur, I just remember dragging her out of there and not knowing what to do next."

"Convenient," Vincent growled. "Did you ever stop to consider that maybe the accident was staged? I'm pretty sure the SHM set you up so they could wring these arms out of you."

"I considered the possibility, but we were deep in secure WRO territory. There was no way any SHM could have gotten in there."

"Never discount anything unless you know for a fact that it's impossible. Besides, if security was so good, how was it that the two of you were managing to circumvent it? Pluck?"

"Tseng has that?" Elena asked. Her tone was more lighthearted than her expression.

"Forget it. The point is that it all makes sense now. When Yuffie and I were en route to Rocket Town we came across the Nibelheim Reactor. I'm sure Cloud has mentioned to you at one point or another that the reactor was where Sephiroth went insane due to his discovery of mako-exposure subjects inside. The SHM had been taking the subjects' corpses and we ended up fighting one of them, a horribly mutated specimen that had eaten the last people the SHM had sent. Cid's analyzing its head, or is supposed to be, but we really don't even need that any more. The SHM are obviously interested in mako exposure to create a new breed of SOLDIER."

"All members of SOLDIER had JENOVA injections, though," Deman pointed out. "That, _coupled_ with the mako exposure, made them exceptionally deadly. What are the SHM going to substitute for the injections? The last JENOVA cells were wiped out years ago."

"I'm sure you know about the SHM's Commander Pan."

"Possibly. I heard something about a failed and highly illegal WRO experiment with him being the only survivor. Reeve dismantled the project when he found out about it."

"Which is the only thing I've heard of him doing in recent memory that jives with the man I knew. At any rate, Pan is a monster. He regenerated his _head_ after I blew it off, he has some kind of muscular enhancement that makes his muscles quadruple in size when he wants them to… Imagine that combined with mako exposure."

"But can the SHM duplicate what was done to Pan?" Elena asked, looking far too interested for it to be healthy. Vincent didn't really blame her.

"Possibly. I don't know. But if they do…"

There was really no need to finish that sentence.

A moment of silence, and then Tseng spoke up: "So are you going to shoot me, Vincent?"

Vincent resisted the urge to roll his eyes again. "Of course not. You were doing something incredibly stupid, but it was the only option you had, wasn't it? It's too late to change anything now, at any rate."

"Now if only you could apply that to your own life, you'd be set," Elena laughed airily.

He gave her an irritated look, less because of her seemingly cavalier attitude towards the whole situation and more because she was right. "At any rate, we need to get you a dose of mako or things may get very bad for you."

"I only need a bath in it once every two weeks or so and it's only been a week. We thought it was strange that we were getting contacted early."

"And I'm willing to wager that our friend here thought it was strange that he was being sent out so early, too," Deman added. "By the way, Vincent, if you happen to have a Cure materia, you might want to stop him from bleeding to death. He'll never have ten fingers again, but…"

"Right." The SHM had definitely gone fishbelly pale in the face, so Vincent crouched over him and focused the Cure materia he'd borrowed from Yuffie before he left – with every intention of returning it, of course. The wounds closed up as much as could be expected and the flow of blood ceased.

"Now," Vincent hissed, grabbing the man by the collar, "we're going to discuss your supplier. You're going to tell us everything you know about this mako operation the SHM have been stringing Tseng along with. And remember that Deman here knows enough to have led you and Tseng by your noses, so do be enlightening. Otherwise there's always more stuff I can shoot off."

The SHM looked, petrified, at Vincent, and proceeded to spill his guts.


	19. Chapter XIX

As it turned out, they had been quite lucky in their catch. The SHM delivering the mako to Tseng and Elena was placed fairly highly in the organization, and what he had to say before Vincent paid Deman and asked him to take the man to the new Wusheng hospital was very enlightening.

They talked as they ran.

"A secret mako reactor," Tseng growled. "Under our very noses."

"Not your fault," Vincent told him as they turned a street corner. "I'm not surprised that there's a reactor under Edge, actually. If you consider how close the city is to what's left of Midgar, and how extensively Deepground runs, it's not far-fetched that we could have missed a reactor in the Incident."

"You'd think that someone would have picked up some kind of activity, though. It might be underground and well-concealed, but you'd _think_, wouldn't you?"

"Not if I didn't expect one to be there to begin with. Believe me when I say it's really not your fault."

"This is all too fishy, though," Elena observed. "Deman misdirects not only Tseng and me but also our SHM contact to meet here, but at the same time the guy tells us that there's mako with this heavy-weaponry shipment the SHM are supposedly keeping in slum sectors nine through twelve? Why would they have mako here unless it was for Tseng and me?"

"They might have other uses for it," Vincent pointed out. "I'm just counting our blessings that we're somewhat near the slums. We shouldn't have much farther to go at this ra-"

He stopped dead in his tracks and sentence, with Tseng and Elena pulling up short as well. "What is it?" Tseng demanded.

Vincent closed his eyes and listened. His hearing wasn't on par with dogs' or cats', but it was quite a bit better than normal human hearing, and so he was able to make out the tromping of lots and lots of feet from quite a distance away.

"I think the SHM are moving," he said.

His companions caught on quickly enough. "The weaponry and mako?" Elena asked.

"Probably. My guess is that the Wusheng either got wind of where it was located or they just pulled a random raid and got lucky. Now they're pulling the stuff back to a more secure location."

"This could lead us to their base of operations if we follow them," Tseng pointed out.

"You mean it could lead us right into a hell of a lot more firepower than we could handle. Best bet is to take them here. People are always more vulnerable while in transit." Vincent pulled Cerberus from his belt and checked it. "You two can fade back if you want."

"I'm thinking no," Elena said. "Tseng and I aren't completely useless after all these years. Lead the way, Vincent."

Vincent didn't know the slums very well, but he was able to triangulate where the SHM were moving and figure out a way to get around and in front of them. The streets in the slums were all cramped, making pulling off an ambush as easy as snapping one's fingers. Tseng and Elena waited in opposite alleyways, while Vincent had scaled a small two-story building and looked down on the approaching enemy from the roof. Fortunately for him, the spot they were ambushing the convoy at was near where he'd left his gauntlet for safekeeping, so he'd picked it up on the way.

The SHM convoy consisted of an infantry vanguard, three vans obviously containing the goods trundling down the streets in the middle of the procession, motorbikes flanking said vans, and an infantry rear guard. A quick count of their numbers put sixteen in the vanguard, four motorbikes, possibly two to three SHM per van, and a dozen in the rear guard. All told, a little less than forty enemies, so about thirteen SHM each to Vincent, Tseng, and Elena.

For his part, Vincent intended to account for more than his share.

He focused on the Fire materia bonded to his arm and blasted off a roaring fireball that hit the center of the vanguard and exploded into a searing inferno, scattering the ranks. Tseng and Elena took the opportunity to move in themselves.

Tseng brandished in his left hand a riot prod similar to the one Vincent recalled Reno having used, and in his right he held a sizable pistol that was busily blowing uncannily accurate holes in the members of the rear guard. The man's skills had not atrophied over the years.

For her part, Elena also carried a small hold-out pistol strapped to her right upper arm, but in a combat situation the mako exposure she'd been going through was not necessarily a bad thing. She gathered herself and leaped twenty feet with pinpoint accuracy to land on the back of one of the motorbikes, then dealt the driver a savage blow to the back of the neck that made him crumple over in his seat. She leaped clear of the vehicle a second before it veered into a wall and went up in a small explosion, then headed for another motorbike.

Vincent switched over to one-round shots and finished off the confused and burnt vanguard with nine rounds, then switched back to triple-round bursts and put one of those in each of the vans' hoods. The bullets, expertly aimed, pierced right through the flimsy metal of the vehicles and blew their engines to pieces. All of the vans veered wildly and one flipped onto its side, skidding for a good twenty yards before smashing itself into a building and coming to a stop. The other two vans' drivers were able to hit their brakes and keep better control of their vehicles, only to get themselves and any other SHM in the vans shot when they tried to get out and use their rides for cover. Vincent hadn't chosen a rooftop position for the scenery.

He leapt the two stories to the ground and landed lightly, making a quick survey of the area. Tseng had taken down the rear guard effortlessly, his pistol having one bullet for each one of the infantry. He was reloading as the former SHM lay in an expanding pool of blood, some of them still twitching.

Elena and the third motorbike driver were having a showdown. The man drove straight at her, not even bothering to draw the pistol at his side. She grinned and watched as the motorbike bore down on her, then at the last minute sidestepped impossibly fast and came up in a spinning kick. The man flew so far off of his vehicle that his ejection turned into a perfect parabolic arc before he hit pavement. Elena landed flawlessly and stretched her leg a bit.

That left one motorbike.

Vincent heard it coming from behind even before Tseng shouted an incoherent warning at him. There was no time to turn around, but it mattered little. Vincent swung his arm down and back to point behind him, Cerberus upside down, and fired, simultaneously lashing out backwards with his gauntlet. The bullets took the driver in the chest and hurled him from his bike; Vincent's punch took the bike itself straight on its nose and slammed its front wheel around so that the vehicle went into a fatal spin, its rear wheel missing Vincent by a bare inch.

A moment later, it hit the overturned van and exploded.

* * *

The intercom buzzed and Pan put down his pen again in irritation. The fact that Nero was calling him personally and not sending an underling to absorb any of Pan's wrath meant something very bad had happened.

He stabbed viciously at the button for the device. "This had better be important, Lieutenant."

"We've just lost contact with our convoy in charge of moving the shipment," Nero reported, the slightest tremor detectable in his voice. "The last transmission we received was from one of the vans – 'sharpshooter on the nearby roof, a man in a red cloak.'"

_Valentine_. Pan's eyes lit up.

"Forget the ambush for the Wusheng. Send the decoy squad new orders, tell them to hold their position and wait for reinforcements to make their stand there. Move all ambush forces from sector thirteen to the last known location of the convoy. Tell them I want Valentine's head on a spike. It'll be worth losing the decoys in order to guarantee that man's death. See to it _personally_."

"Understood, sir."

"Oh, and Lieutenant? Send a pair of guards down here to dispose of our erstwhile traitor. And tell them to bring a rag and plenty of soap."

"Yessir."

Pan switched off the intercom and idly regarded the crimson spattered all over his temporary office's walls, then looked at what was left of the Wusheng's informant. That reminded him – Terrence. He pulled out a transfer order form and filled it out before he returned to his writing. The labs in Edge needed new blood. He'd have one of the guards take it to the young man after they finished cleaning up all of the stuff on his walls.

After all, Pan couldn't abide messiness.

* * *

"Shit," Vincent growled. "I didn't mean for it to hit the van."

Elena, apparently unfazed by the blazing inferno that had been the motorbike, moved close enough to peer into the partially-opened rear doors of the van. Her glowing eyes widened a bit, but not out of shock or surprise: Vincent could distinguish that she was altering her vision in some way, perhaps even unconsciously. The physical alterations from the mako exposure might fade once she had been completely weaned from the substance, but she would never be entirely human again.

"There's a bunch of anti-tank weaponry and the like in here," she called out. "Rockets, explosives, that kind of thing. They're all pretty well-sealed, though, so I doubt the outside temperature's going to make a difference. I just wouldn't want to let any of the flames get _inside_ the van."

"Pray that they don't, then," Vincent said. "If all those explosives went up, it would probably level that building. We're lucky in that this area seems to be fairly deserted, even for this time of night."

Tseng, in the meanwhile, had gone and opened up the backs of the other vans. "Lots of heavy automatic weaponry in this one," he reported. "Ammunition for it, too. Obviously all WRO make."

"Supplied by you?"

"Most of it," Tseng admitted, shamefaced. "Shit." He cast his gaze down to the ground and pounded a fist against the back of the van. "SHIT!"

"Stop," Vincent told him before the ex-Turk could go any further. "Hindsight is perfect. You did what you had to do. You love her, after all."

"How many people have they killed because of me, Vincent? Can we even begin to keep track?"

"No. You screwed up and now it's time to make up for that. That's all. Enough on this, what's in the other van?"

Tseng moved to look, and Vincent took the opportunity to shout down the voice in his head. _Easy enough for you to lecture _him _about moving on from one's mistakes, eh, Valentine? Easy enough to tell _him _to pick up the pieces of his life and do what has to be done. You fucking hypocrite._

_Shut up._

"Oh, wow," Tseng said. "Both of you, come and look at this."

Inside the third van was paydirt. Row upon row of glowing vials of mako, many of them shattered from the conflict but just as many intact.

"This just supports the idea that they're trying to put together a new breed of SOLDIER," Vincent observed. "Why else would they need this much mako?"

"No idea, but I think we should take advantage of the situation," Tseng said. He reached inside and palmed several vials of the stuff. "Staggered over the course of a couple months or so, this should be enough to get Elena's levels down to where she's no longer dependent."

"The rest will have to go to the Wusheng," Vincent said. "But I don't think it can hurt at this point for you to take some. Elena needs to get completely weaned off of it and this can only help."

They moved away from the van and paused to deliberate their next course of action. "If these guys were moving out because of a Wusheng raid, we should have friendly units inbound any minute now," Tseng conjectured. "We could just stay here and wait."

"Too risky," Vincent disagreed. "I say wait, yes, but we need to get back into an ambush position in case we have unfriendly visitors. This way when the Wusheng find the stuff they won't have any idea about your involvement – I doubt they'd take kindly to finding mako on you."

"Good point. Elena?"

"I agree with Vincent," she said. "We ought to –"

She never got to finish her sentence. There was a thundercrack and Vincent felt himself flying, a ringing in his ears. His senses came back to him a moment later and he was lying on his back, already getting to his feet automatically. Tseng and Elena had been sent flying, sprawling, by a pinpoint explosive charge that had been delivered so precisely between the three of them that Vincent suspected a launcher of some sort had to have been involved.

That was when he saw the silhouettes of SHM on all the rooftops around him. Hundreds of them, all of them with weapons trained.

One particular silhouette stepped to the fore and raised what looked like a megaphone to its mouth.

"Vincent Valentine, this is Lieutenant Nero of the Wutai Division of the Silver-Haired Men. Drop your weapon and surrender peaceably, and we might let your friends get away with their limbs intact."


	20. Chapter XX

Evening readers, Mengde here. It's been a while, I know, especially for having left you at such a cliffhanger. I do apologize for that - I'm juggling this and rewriting my second novel and college at the same time, but rest assured this fic will not go unfinished. With that said, here's Chapter XX, as well as updated versions of Chapters I and II - updated in the sense that I cleared up some things that might conflict with future internal continuity. Go back and read if you like, they're not too different but I made the point of changing them so you know it has a measure of importance. Enjoy.

* * *

"Lieutenant Nero," Vincent said, tasting the name on his tongue. It had a particularly foul flavor. He switched over to his night vision to pierce the man's silhouette and saw a bald, short, stocky fellow, with beady little eyes and a square jaw, a flat nose, and thick, rubbery lips that were currently peeled off of his teeth in an animalistic grin behind the megaphone he held in his left hand. In his right hand he hefted what looked like a scaled-down rocket launcher, which Vincent knew to actually be a grenade launcher. "That was a nice explosive. I'm wondering – were you the one who set up those explosives to level that hospital? If so, where'd you manage to get those A78 CC HEDs?" 

"Nice homework, Valentine," the man laughed through his megaphone. "Unfortunately for you, it's not going to get you anywhere. Now, drop your weapon or I'll blow it off of you."

"Lieutenant, you've already made a major tactical error and you don't even know it," Vincent chided the man. "I don't know how you obtained that post – the SHM's standards must be lax."

Nero barked a short, harsh laugh. "Tactical error, Valentine? I have two hundred men on the surrounding rooftops and fifty more coming down the street from each direction, all of them armed to the teeth and with orders to kill you. We've got you surrounded, boxed in. We outnumber, outgun, and we've definitely outsmarted you. Pray tell what tactical error I've made."

"Well, you _did _just tell me your numbers as part of a vain boast, but that's not the one I'm talking about. No, it's actually very simple."

All the feigned mirth vanished from Vincent's expression and his gaze bored into Nero's._"You didn't kill me with that first shot."_

In the next second he was gone, and he'd sent a roaring fireball shooting straight up the barrel of the man's grenade launcher.

The explosion was deafening. Nero was reduced to a bloody smear on the roof, and all the troops on the rooftop with him were blown away as well. General confusion erupted within the SHM ranks, and those that kept their heads realized that Tseng and Elena had disappeared, too.

In reality, Vincent had been building up the fireball while playing with Nero's head, cutting at the man's ego to keep him talking, and then had ducked into the nearest alley as soon as he'd let the spell fly. Elena, knowing very well what he was planning, had grabbed Tseng and also vanished into an alley as soon as Nero exploded.

"Shit," Tseng gasped as she set him back down on his feet. "We were careless."

"Not important right now," Elena said, scanning the alley and making sure it was clear. "Right now we need to get away from here as fast as we can. Vincent will be retreating already, I'm sure –"

"No," Tseng interrupted. "You weren't looking at him while he was talking to the late Lieutenant. If you had been, you would've seen his eyes."

"…And?"

With a short grunt, Tseng pulled his piece and checked to make sure it was loaded, then motioned for her to follow him. "First time I've felt sorry for the SHM."

* * *

The ambush unit had been separated into distinct squads of fifty for convenience of compartmental ordering and cohesion. In addition to his personal unit that had gone up in the explosion with him, Nero had assigned squads A through D a rooftop apiece and ordered squads E and F to advance from opposite directions along the road. Their net was to have been flawless. 

Vincent didn't know any of this. He was just thanking the dead man for splitting up his forces and making the ex-Turk's job that much easier.

He vaulted up between two buildings and landed on a rooftop adjacent the one where Nero had been stationed. The SHM here were milling about in confusion, pointing their rifles at everything and nothing, not sure whether to advance, retreat, or stay where they were. They had no leader; if someone went and scraped clean the surface of the rooftop adjacent it was doubtful they'd get more than a quarter of what had been the Lieutenant.

Vincent laid into them like a particularly vengeful scythe into stalks of wheat. He went into the mass from one end and came out the other, leaving almost half of them dead or incapacitated in his wake – and he hadn't even fired any bullets. The rest shouted and began to swivel their weapons at him, and the squads on the other rooftops seemed to realize what was going on, but by the time they set their sights properly he wasn't there anymore.

On the rooftop across the street, something ripped into the SHM there from behind. Screams rose up and the other squads reacted faster this time, whirling and putting the rooftop in their sights. A fireball shot up into the air from what looked like amidst the crowd of bodies, and that set the other squads off. They all opened fire, cutting down every one of their comrades on that roof in a vain attempt to kill the man that wasn't even there.

Vincent had dropped back off of the roof and let loose another fireball, then circled around to another building and was already on top of it. Before these SHM had even stopped firing at the roof that had until three seconds ago been host to squad C, something was attacking them.

Another fireball, another frantic and lethal reaction from the remaining two squads. At this point they'd caused far more of their own casualties than Vincent had. He was gone again, gathering himself at the edge of the roof and leaping silently into the night sky as the bodies twitched behind him.

He passed behind the building with the only unmolested squad on it, and keeping the concrete structure between himself and the first SHM he'd attacked, he let fly another fireball that impacted just over the lip of the roof where everyone could see it. He was fast going to be out of magic at this rate, but the sight of the fiery missiles was more than enough to drive all his enemies into a frenzy by this point. He could hear the screams telling their comrades to stop as the other rooftop opened fire, and the two groups actually began shooting at one another, each in an attempt to get the other to stop.

When the gunfire ceased, there were no more SHM on the rooftops.

From where he crouched in the shadows of an alleyway, Vincent heard nothing but silence. He permitted himself a satisfied grin, and then the obvious caught up with him. Nero had said that he had men advancing down the street, so where were –

His reasoning was interrupted by a savage blow to his head from behind. It sent him sprawling and made him see red, his vision flickering for a moment before he rolled to his feet and whirled, Cerberus cocked and ready.

The attacker was bare inches away from the gun's barrel, a shadow with a flash of silver hair, so he fired, letting a triple round rip into the SHM's face. His enemy's body jerked backwards from the impact, but still managed to bring one of its boots up into his gut and send him staggering backwards into the street.

_Oh_.

_There _were the other hundred SHM.

And their leader…

Pan strode out of the alleyway, his face already knitting itself closed, the bullets Vincent had planted in it falling to the ground with sharp _plink_ing noises. "Vincent Valentine," he laughed, "it seems you've made something of a tactical error."

* * *

Neither Yuffie nor Reno had been able to protest when Rude had come into the house, gathered them up, and told them to get into Yuffie's car. Yuffie had been too busy worrying about where Vincent could be as she watched news report after news report on the war spreading through Wutai, and Reno had been taking a nap in between rounds of physical therapy for Cid's gift to him. 

It was just as well – when Yuffie finally mustered the wits to ask where they were going and Rude told them that they were going to meet up with Tseng, the both of them were excited enough by the implications of the meeting not to care about the abruptness of it all.

"How'd you get ahold of him?" Reno asked from the backseat.

"He got hold of me," Rude corrected him. "Said something about a deal gone wrong. Was helping Vincent take down a SHM shipment. Got ambushed, had to retreat. Vincent didn't run."

"He's going to need our help," Yuffie said urgently, leaning forward past the back of Rude's seat. "Especially if he runs into that Pan guy. Step on it!"

"Don't backseat drive," Rude told her. She sat back with a pouting expression and stuck her tongue out at the back of his head.

Ten minutes later they were pulling to a stop at the side of the road. Tseng slid into the front seat and Elena into the back, cramping Reno and Yuffie slightly. They didn't really notice, being too busy staring amazedly at the transformation she'd undergone.

"Drive," Tseng said shortly. "We'll explain everything later. Right now Vincent's going to need our help. Take a right here."

Rude swung the car around the corner and said, "Just tell us where to go. We're ready."

"Neither of us really brought weapons –" Yuffie started.

"I put them in the trunk. Figured this wasn't going to be a joyful reunion."

There was a thundering sound and the car shook. Dust billowed up in the streets and all the windows of the buildings for a block around rattled.

"What the hell was that?" Reno exclaimed.

Tseng glanced up at the sky, eyes sighting on the very familiar, low-flying airship that had just blazed overhead. "The eagles are coming, I'd say."

* * *

A hundred SHM ringed the two combatants in, rifles leveled and ready to fire at a moment's notice. They knew their orders; until one of the men dropped, they were to stay where they were and not move an inch. 

Sound military thinking it was not, but a vendetta and the promise of a challenging fight had a way of altering Pan's mental processes.

For his part, Vincent was playing it defensively, biding his time. There was no opening he could exploit in either the ring of men around him or in his opponent's defenses, so all he could do was wait for divine intervention, which he had little to no faith in. It couldn't hurt to hope for a miracle, though it might have helped if he'd had any right to pray.

His head snapped back as Pan landed a nasty uppercut and followed with a snap kick into Vincent's gut. The gunman staggered, turning his momentum into a spinning fall and lashing out with his own kick at Pan's legs at the same time. His attack swept the man's feet out from under him, bowling him onto the asphalt, giving Vincent time to roll back to his feet and put some distance between them. Cerberus was empty and reloading it would give Pan enough of an opening to rip Vincent's head right off of his shoulders. He was in a bind, all right.

Pan got back to his feet and dusted himself off with a wicked grin. Valentine was playing it safe and close to the chest, all right. He remembered what had happened last time.

Both of them were struck deaf for a moment as an airship rocketed overhead in a blaze of light and sound, so close to the ground that the pebbles at their feet trembled and skipped about. The roar faded into the distance, though, and the hope that had risen in Vincent was quickly dashed.

_Wait… was that the_ Shera_ I saw?_

It was impossible. They'd never sent a call for Cid to come. Of course, Yuffie could have done that after Vincent left, but it was unlikely. The old pilot had told them to contact him for transportation purposes only, not to fight a war for them.

"Hoping to see a familiar face aboard that ship?" Pan asked, noting how Vincent's gaze lingered on the receding form of the airship. "You're dead, Valentine, even if you don't know it. You remember what happened last time, you know you can't match me."

There! Past Pan's head, on the rooftop where Vincent had hit the first squad of SHM. Almost indistinguishable from the night sky, a pair of lights twinkled in the darkness.

A pair of glowing eyes.

"Maybe not," Vincent agreed. "But I'm fairly sure that _he _can."

Confusion crossed Pan's face for a second, and then he whirled, following Vincent's gaze, just in time to run smack into the blazing strike of a Blade Beam. The energy blew into him and sent him staggering back, his front side burned and his hair smoldering. All the SHM on the side of the circle from where the attack had come twisted around to look up at the roof, only to realize that its occupant had leapt down into the circle and started striding towards Pan.

"You're tough," Cloud observed, shouldering the First Tsurugi. "That would've cut any ordinary man in half."

Vincent took the moment to discreetly reload Cerberus. All the SHM were frozen with indecision, not knowing whether shooting the intruder dead would violate Pan's orders and bring his wrath down on them.

"I'm not an ordinary man," Pan growled. "You're going to have to do better than that, Cloud Strife."

Cloud shrugged. "Fine."

There was a blaze of light and movement, and Cloud straightened, returning the First Tsurugi to his back, as Pan hit the ground in sixteen pieces behind him.

"The rest of you, clear off. I'd like to not kill anyone else tonight." The SHM took his advice – ten seconds later, it was like they had never been there at all. Cloud turned to Vincent with a sheepish grin. "Hey."

"Long time no see," Vincent observed darkly. "What brings you to Wutai?"

Cloud's expression sobered. "That's a long and circuitous story."

One of Pan's limbs twitched.


	21. Chapter XXI

"Pull yourself together, Commander."

The voice was deep, commanding, carrying with it something of a melodious air that just barely managed to cover the hate underneath it, like quickly burning silk cloth over searing-hot metal.

Pan knew that voice. He twitched one eye open, looked at his would-be rescuer. "They're gone, then?"

"Of course they are. They weren't thorough at all – if they'd incinerated your 'remains' I doubt we'd be having this conversation."

The upper half of Pan's torso shrugged its shoulders and his head, which lay several feet away, grinned. "Their loss." His limbs gave sharp spasms and knitted themselves back together, then twitched and jerked across the ground over to the several pieces his torso had been hacked into, pushing them back together until they were healed, and then attached themselves to it.

Pan's body got up, dusted itself off, and almost as an afterthought picked up his head and put it back on its shoulders.

He cracked his neck and gave a small, vexed sigh. "Well, damn. If I'd known I would have Strife coming, I would have killed Valentine faster. One stupid turn deserves another, I suppose."

"Indeed," his superior said curtly. "You needn't worry, though, Commander. You've done an excellent job. Now that Strife is here, he's out of the picture in Edge, which is where we're making our big move. Give us another day of distracting him and you'll be able to return. Then it won't matter how fast and strong he comes at us – it'll be far too late."

"Understood, sir. Shall we send the command center up in a blaze of glory?"

"I think so, yes. Let the heroic Wusheng troops locate it and storm it. We'll be back for them another time, after all. Just make sure that nobody thinks you to be alive. With Strife and his friends thinking you're dead, we have at our fingertips some excellent strategic and tactical advantages."

"Yes, sir. Is there anything else?"

The man hesitated, pursed his lips for a moment. "Doubtful though it may be," he said after a minute's thought, "if Strife should storm the base with the Wusheng and it comes to killing him or letting him and the Wusheng have their victory, choose the latter. I want him for myself."

Pan's mouth twitched in a smile. "Then, if I could make a similar request of you?"

"You could."

"I want Valentine. He's not my match, but he's the closest anybody's come in recent memory – with the exception of Strife, of course. And… something about him is interesting. He holds his cards very close to his chest. I find myself wondering what his hand could be."

"I will grant you that. After all, you _have_ done quite well. That will be all, Commander."

"Until next time, General."

The man turned and stalked away into the shadows, and Pan took a moment to study his back before he disappeared. He couldn't be who he presumed to be. Pan had stood by helplessly and watched the battle in the sky all those years ago, and he'd seen how it had ended. Strife was a demon in combat, and nobody could have survived those final strikes he'd delivered – not even Pan as he was now, who had just taken the original Omnislash and lived to laugh about it.

But if the man wasn't Sephiroth, then who was he?

* * *

They held a conference the next morning at Yuffie's house, Makoto included. 

"We got a lead on their command center last night," he said to everyone. "One of our inside men reported that the SHM were evacuating a shipment of weaponry from some slum sectors we happened to be sweeping. We found the shipment, or what was left of it, but that got us no closer to where the SHM are based, and what's more, our man hasn't reported in again since then."

"Not my fault," Vincent said blandly.

"Of course not – there was no way you could have known. As it turns out, hindsight being perfect, I'm fairly sure that our man was made to report erroneously and then killed. The convoy we were tracking down was a decoy and had nothing but foodstuffs; we're thinking it was leading us into the ambush that got redirected to hit you when you took out the real thing. Still, I'm fairly certain we'll have another lead by the end of today, and now that Pan is dead we won't be having nearly as much trouble coping strategically."

Vincent's expression turned disquieting at the mention of Pan. "I doubt he's dead. We should have burned the body."

Cloud raised an eyebrow at him. "In case you didn't notice, Vincent, I hit him with an Omnislash. Could he survive being chopped into that many pieces?"

"I'm not sure enough that he couldn't to say so. He regenerated his head after I blew it off, and he managed to control his body even with a broken neck. I don't know what he is, but I shouldn't have underestimated him again."

"Whether he's dead or not," Yuffie cut in, "doesn't matter at this point. Right now the SHM are on the rebound – they've just taken a major loss. It's time to hit them hard again, not let them come back twice as strong. We just need to figure out where and how."

Makoto looked like he was about to say something further, but his phone abruptly rang and he stepped outside to take the call. Cid took the opportunity to projectile-spit his current piece of nicotine gum into the trash and say, "So. Yuffie. You get me any cigs?"

She grinned sheepishly at him. "'Fraid not, old man. I'll buy you some before we leave town, though. Which leads to the question – what the hell are you doing here, anyway?"

The old pilot groaned with disappointment and popped in another piece of gum. "Well, it was about two in the fuckin' morning when Boy Scout here –" and at this he indicated Cloud – "called me and said he needed a ride into Wutai. Urgent-like. So I told Shera I'd be taking the ol' girl out for a spin and might not be back for a bit."

"Let me guess," Tseng said from where he and Elena sat. "Cloud, you're here on Reeve's orders to help resolve the SHM crisis, and for the duration of your absence he'll be taking on your administrative duties."

Cloud offered a sickly grin. "Pretty much, yeah."

"Would you say you guys were right about him yet, partn- er, Rude?" Reno asked.

Rude gave a fractional nod. "Technically he hasn't taken over Tseng's job yet, but give it a bit. He'll find some excuse and then the WRO'll be practically a dictatorship."

All of them fell silent for a bit at that particular prospect, then Yuffie visibly shook it off and said, "Well, no sense sitting around and moping about it. I say we help Makoto get rid of the silver-haired bastards here, and then figure out our next move."

"Hear, hear," Cid crowed. "Things've been so borin' in Rocket Town since we rounded up them rats, I'm dyin' for a little fun."

Makoto chose that moment to come back in, an expression of disbelief on his face. "I don't believe it."

"Good news or bad?" Reno asked before anyone else could say anything.

"Good, amazingly good. An officer of the third watch was on patrol when he and his men saw some SHM apparently moving some materiel or supplies. He decided to follow them and they led him to an old building in the warehouse district. Upon close inspection, there's a concealed entryway into what he guesses is an old underground bunker, probably built decades ago during the war with Shin-Ra. Tactical's gone over all the old city maps and they confirm that this bunker is big enough to house the SHM's base of operations. All I have to do is give the word and we bring the hammer down."

Vincent narrowed his eyes. "I don't trust this."

"You're just a bundle of joy and positivism, aren't you?" Elena observed. "You think it's a trap?"

"I think you were meant to find it. I think the SHM are done with Wutai, and they want you to think you've scored a major victory when they've really pulled all their important assets out."

"We found it by pure coincidence, Vincent," Makoto protested.

"The SHM know you keep regular patrols. I'm willing to bet that the same squad of them were moving the same materiel back and forth in and out of the base for hours until they picked up your aforementioned officer's attention."

Nobody looked like they wanted to be convinced, but all of them knew that Vincent's words were ringing with a core of truth. "All right, then," Makoto said, "but why now? Why pull out at this point? They just lost a huge shipment of weapons, not to mention mako, as well as hundreds of their men. Pulling out now would be a huge blow to their morale."

"Pan and whoever his superiors are aren't interested in the lives of their men, to say nothing of their morale. That wouldn't factor one whit into their decision. No, their reason for retreating is simple. What's changed in Wutai between yesterday and today?"

Everyone stared at him in silence. Finally Yuffie said, "Stop being a showoff and tell us!"

Vincent cracked his first partial smile for the day before he returned to being stoic and pointed at Cloud. "This man right here."

Cid immediately started guffawing. "Yer fuckin' rich, Valentine. Strife shows up and the SHM piss their pants and run! If only it was so easy, eh?"

"This has nothing to do with fear. I wouldn't even call it a retreat. It's a reallocation of their forces. They know that Cloud represents a major deterrent to their plans, so now that they have him here…"

"Edge," Cloud said, his eyes blazing with comprehension. "They're going to hit Edge."

Cid let loose with a particularly colorful string of phrases concerning the SHM"s questionable collective parentage, while the rest of them stared at Vincent, wide-eyed, as the same comprehension dawned on them.

"If we take the _Shera _now, when would we get there?" Yuffie asked.

"I nearly burned the old girl out gettin' Strife here so fast," Cid swore. "Day and a half, maybe. If I push it."

"I think you should," Reno drawled. "I really, really do."

"That's settled, then." The old pilot stood and made for the door. "I'm gonna get her primed and ready. The rest of you, get yer shit together. We leave in an hour." He was gone in the next moment.

The room abruptly turned into a mass of moving people, with the exception of Vincent and Cloud, who stayed seated, and Makoto, who stood stock-still, dumbstruck.

"I'm sorry, Makoto," Cloud finally said.

The man visibly recovered his composure. "Not your fault," he said briskly. "And this really is a good thing – Wutai can count on going unmolested by them for a while, now. I'll handle the cleanup. You need to leave as soon as possible."

"Thank you." He stood up and walked out of the room, intent on getting his things together. Vincent supposed he should pack, as well, so he got up too.

"Just a second," Makoto said. "Do me a favor, Vincent."

Vincent looked the young man in the eye and read the conviction there, nodded.

"Those bastards used my city and killed my people as a _distraction_. I'm needed here. I can't go and do what ought to be done. So do me this favor, and don't let a single one of them escape."

Vincent nodded gravely. "You can count on us, Makoto. The SHM won't know what hit them."

* * *

"Maybe you'd like to explain yourself now," Yuffie said. 

She'd cornered Vincent in the guestroom where he was pulling together his meager possessions and checking Cerberus. "Explain myself how?"

One second Yuffie was looking angrily at him, jaw working, and a moment later it was gone and she was holding him in an iron grip around his torso, face buried in his chest. "Where did you _go?_" she demanded, voice muffled. "I thought so many things could have happened to you, I thought –"

Instinctively Vincent started to push her off of him, but he stopped himself, instead laying his right hand gently on her shoulder. "I'm sorry," he said, meaning it. "It was my fault. I felt responsible for the hospital, and I wanted to make the one who did the deed account for it."

"The hospital wasn't your fault," Yuffie insisted. "It was us who should have listened to you. We all wanted the same thing you did, Vincent, so why did you do it alone?"

"I didn't want you to get involved –"

She pulled her face out of his chest and stared defiantly at him. "You stupid stuck-up bastard, I'm just as goddamn involved as you are! This is my city, and what's more, I'm the one who brought you back from the fucking _dead_ so we could do this! You don't have to do everything alone and be the one responsible for everything, Vincent! You can count on m– on us! We're here for you, dammit!" Her head tilted forward again until her forehead just touched his chest, and he could feel her gaze on his boots. "You were there for _me_. Let me return the favor."

Vincent felt no words come. He stood there, and stroked Yuffie's hair, and wondered at what a fool he had been.


	22. Chapter XXII

In the past, there had been times when Vincent had wondered, privately, how Yuffie managed to talk so much without her tongue getting tired. It was a serious problem that he'd debated internally for many nights as he stood watch, back when AVALANCHE had been closer and the world had been a larger place.

Later, he'd marveled – with an extreme degree of professionalism, of course – at how she could grip a lockpick between her teeth and use it to open a pair of handcuffs just by directing it with that tongue. Again he'd wondered how she did it.

At the present moment, she was lying on top of him, exploring his mouth with that same tongue, and he had no presence of mind whatsoever with which to formulate questions.

Vincent didn't remember where they were or how they got here, but Yuffie's body was warm against his and she was doing things with that amazing tongue that he was fairly sure violated the laws of physics, so he wasn't going to complain or try to puzzle out the logistics of the situation.

She grabbed him by the collar and pulled him up into a sitting position, planting herself squarely in his lap and straddling him as she continued to work his tongue with her own, reaching through his cloak and running her fingers down his chest with her free hand at the same time. He reciprocated, pulling her closer to him with his left hand, free of its usual golden prison, stroking her spine with his right. She moaned and arched against him, grinding her hips into his, her hand letting go of his collar in favor of running down his face. They withdrew from each other's mouths for a moment, not pulling apart any further than that, and he felt her lips curve into a smile.

Vincent opened his eyes to look at her and fell onto his back as he tried instinctively to recoil. She was covered in bruises, her face was cut and bleeding, and her eyes were dull and lifeless. One of her arms was at an odd angle, and the fingers on her hand twitched spasmodically.

She cocked her head and looked at him quizzically, then opened her mouth to speak. "What's wrong, Vincent?" The words came out in Reno's voice.

Vincent opened his eyes to see the bottom of the bunk atop his own. He didn't sweat, but he was sure that if he did he would have been soaked through with it. As it was, the bedsheets were tangled and snarled about his limbs, as though he had been thrashing in his sleep, which he doubtless had.

"What's wrong, Vincent?" The question was repeated, and Vincent finally remembered that he was on the _Shera_, bound for Edge, and that he was bunking with Cloud. He'd decided to break his streak of sleeplessness, figuring it couldn't do any harm.

_Fuck that._

"Nothing," Vincent quickly lied.

"You were thrashing around and muttering," Cloud's voice drifted down from the top bunk. "I think that qualifies as something wrong."

Feeling like a sullen child, Vincent said, "Nightmare."

There was a long pause. "You get them too, huh? I didn't know if… if Hojo had changed that."

"I do. Quite frequently. It's why I try to hibernate instead of sleep. My hibernation is dreamless."

"Ah." Another pause. "Want to talk about it? It helps me."

Vincent snorted gently. "Talking about it helps you? What?"

He regretted his amusement when Cloud explained himself. "I still get nightmares, Vincent. Mostly about all of you. I see AVALANCHE dead and Sephiroth standing over you, smirking. He tells me that I'm a failure of a leader and that a better man could have prevented this."

"I'm sorry."

He could hear Cloud's shrug rustle against the man's sheets. "No big deal. I wake up around then, and usually manage to wake Tifa up. I told her about it a few years ago and that helped – I got the nightmare less frequently. I still get it, but it's diminished, over the years. Haven't had it for nearly nine months, now. A new record."

The bitterness in his friend's voice made Vincent wince a bit. "I really am sorry. Sometimes it pays to be reminded that I'm not the only one, I guess."

"I said no big deal. We talked about this, remember?"

Vincent almost cracked a smile. "Yes. 'Are sins ever forgiven?'"

"'I've never tried.'"

"Now that you have, did it go well for you?"

"Yeah. It really did. What about you, Vincent? Are you going to try? Are you trying right now?"

Vincent closed his eyes. Yuffie was waiting behind his eyelids, broken and battered, looking at him pleadingly. _Your fault._

_Shut up._

"I am. I think it's going well. I've learned things, after all. I'm starting to try to put things behind me – things that I can't change, things that weren't really my fault. That sort of thing." He hesitated and then added, "It's not as easy as you make it look."

He could imagine Cloud's half-smile. "But I made a huge deal out of it and made it look like an agonizing process."

"I know. It's much worse than that."

Cloud chuckled. "Goodnight, Vincent."

"Goodnight, Cloud."

* * *

The next morning, Vincent woke up to find that they had taken on passengers. 

He found out when he walked into the galley of the _Shera_, intent on getting some water. Sitting at one of the tables were a pair of lean, predatory animals with blazing red fur. They were conversing in quiet cackle-purrs with an occasional strained yelp thrown in for good measure.

"Morning, Red," Vincent said as he moved to the icebox and pulled out a bottle of chilled water. "I take it you joined us late last night."

"Something like that," Red XIII replied. "This is Naiad, by the way."

"You've told me about her. A pleasure to meet you."

"Nanaki has told me about you as well, Vincent Valentine," Naiad said, her ocean-blue eyes flashing. "It is good to meet you, too."

"So, Naiad and I were stargazing last night, as we often tend to," Red XIII continued. "We were interrupted, however, when the _Shera_ shot by overhead, managing to wake up the entire canyon, then turned around, came back, and landed in front of us. We were unsure what to make of it until Cid conveniently informed us via the ship's external speakers that there is a crisis in the making in Edge and that we should board."

"To be precise," Naiad added, "he told us we should get our 'lazy asses' onto his ship before he 'blew shit up.' Cid Highwind seems to have an interesting vocabulary."

Vincent took a sip of water and said, "That's not the half of it. We'll leave it at that, though – I'm sure he'll be more than happy to acquaint you with his vocabulary himself."

The ship's intercom took that moment to crackle to life. "Assholes! Get the fuck up to the bridge!"

Vincent let the silence hang for a few seconds before he took another sip of water, the sound of which seemed particularly loud when the only thing to compare it to was Red XIII's almost undetectable chuckling purr. "I think he wants us on the bridge, then."

"I received that general impression," Naiad commented. "Thank you for clarifying it, though. You are useful, Vincent Valentine."

"Glad to hear it. Shall we?"

They arrived on the bridge a minute later to find that the rest of the party was there as well, all crowded around the radio. Even from outside the bridge, Vincent's enhanced hearing picked up Barret's booming voice emitting squeakily from the speaker there, but he still moved closer and joined the crowd of people.

Yuffie caught his gaze and gave him a small smile, which he did his best to reciprocate. Reno also nodded at him from where he stood with an arm around Yuffie, then turned his attention back to the radio, which was busily sounding like an angry oil prospector.

"…all sorts of shit going down here. Man can't visit his daughter and old friend without getting the fuckin' roof dropped in on his head anymore!"

"You're in Edge?" Vincent asked.

"Valentine, that you?" Barret rumbled. "Hell yes I'm in Edge, and wishing I wasn't. There's rioting in the streets, SHM-style. The WRO is doing jack-all to stop 'em, too. Without Cloud here it's like they got a collective case of limp –"

"We have the idea," Vincent quickly cut Barret off. "Cid, how far are we from Edge?"

"Still got a day to go, kiddo," Cid said with a shake of his head. "I pushed her too hard gettin' the Boy Scout to Wutai. Engines need time to build up a boost charge again if we're going to be making record-breaking travel time."

Cloud pretended not to hear the old pilot's closing remark and asked Barret, "Is Tifa there?"

"Yeah, she and Marlene and Denzel are here, safe 'n sound. I'll put her on for you, Strife."

"Thanks, Barret."

A moment passed and then the radio gave a short buzz before Tifa's voice came on. "Hello, Cloud."

"Tifa. It's good to hear from you. Are things as bad as Barret's making them out to be? You know he can tend to exaggerate things."

"He's not exaggerating anything, Cloud. I had no idea the SHM were so numerous. And on top of that – I'm not sure, but I think I saw something more than just SHM out there. I couldn't say what it was, but it was definitely… not human."

"Ten gil says I know what you saw," Cid broke in.

"All right, I'll give you a mojito on the house if you can convince me."

"I hate friggin' mojitos, Lockhart, and you know it!"

"Just tell me what it was!"

"Fine," Cid growled. "When I first ran into them after Yuffie got Valentine up and running again, they gave me this wonderful present – the head of one of the things that had been exposed to tons of mako runoff in the Nibelheim reactor. They wanted me to analyze it for them, tell them if there was anything special about it.

"Turns out there was. Valentine told us last night that he thinks the SHM are making a new breed of SOLDIER. They were collecting the mako specimens' corpses and probably running analyses on them, tryin' to figure out what made 'em tick. You may not know this, but Elena had an 'accident' where she nearly died of mako overexposure, and the SHM have had Tseng in a corner giving her mako baths to wean her off of the stuff, right? We think they did that on purpose to get a kind of second-party test result on what just straight mako exposure does. You haven't seen her, but she's still human – not entirely, but still pretty much human. Nothing like the freaks in the tubes.

"So sure, she was just exposed that one time, the freaks were exposed for years. All well and dandy. But the freaks, they had something different about 'em. My analysis shows that – get this – my specimen, and probably by extension the rest of 'em, had all been injected with JENOVA cells. What we were looking at when we saw the freaks in the tubes were the prototypes of Shin-Ra's SOLDIER program."

"And the SHM are looking at what Shin-Ra did to make their own SOLDIER units? What I saw outside didn't look like –"

"Think about it for a bit, Tifa," Cloud interrupted. "With Shin-Ra, they wanted power, but at the same time they had at least a sham façade of a public image to consider, to say nothing of the loyalties of their own employees. They couldn't go around employing monsters to keep the peace. Their SOLDIER program was the rest of a careful harmonization of the amount of mako exposure after JENOVA injection. You know the mutagenic properties of mako – it was just a matter of increasing the dose to increase how much it affected the specimens."

"So what you're saying," Tifa said, "is that the SHM have harvested JENOVA cells from the prototype SOLDIERs created by Shin-Ra, and used them to create their own strain of SOLDIER that's a lot less human than what we've faced before."

"No," Vincent interrupted, comprehension blazing in his eyes. "The SHM didn't do that. Well – they did, but they had help."

"What?" Yuffie demanded. "Who the hell would help them?"

"Good question. The question I'm asking, though, is this: after the JENOVA War and the Deepground Crisis, how many people were left alive that knew about the Nibelheim Reactor and what had gone on there? Answer: apart from a few retired scientists of Shin-Ra's, nobody but us, meaning AVALANCHE, and Rufus. Obviously Rufus isn't involved here, so who does that leave who would know and tell the SHM and put this plan to make new SOLDIERs into their heads?"

All of them looked at him, confused, and he was sure that Tifa and Barret were waiting impatiently on the other end of the radio. It was Rude, however, who got it first.

"Reeve."


	23. Chapter XXIII

"I don't believe it," Tifa's voice came through the radio.

"Think about it for a minute before you reject it out of hand," Vincent told her. "He wasn't with us when Cloud first told us the story of what happened at the Reactor, but as a Shin-Ra executive he would know at least of its existence to begin with. Not to mention that Cloud has never been unforthcoming about the place. Then there was Elena's 'accident.' I think, Tseng, that you two weren't being as circumspect as you believed, and that Reeve knew what you were doing. Therefore, he set up the accident in order to get de facto experimental results on what would happen to Elena when she was exposed to mako without any JENOVA injections."

"But how would Reeve know that I would be forced to turn to the SHM for a mako supply to wean her off of?" Tseng asked. "If he wanted to get results that badly, couldn't he supply it himself and pretend to not have any knowledge of how Elena might have gotten exposed to it?"

"Why bother reveal that he knows anything at all when he could have you go to his puppets and then give them the supplies they need without tipping his own hand?" Vincent countered. "It's damningly obvious now that Reeve is behind the SHM, as well. He put them together, probably using middlemen with sham identities to pose as whoever is supposed to be in charge, and then arranged for Elena to have her accident in order to get you to fund them in addition to whatever he had to have been diverting to get them off of the ground. With a large populace of disenfranchised people looking for any kind of job they could get, not to mention a lot of ex-soldiers and mercenaries who would want work like this, they had ample recruiting opportunities the world over.

"Their insurgency has consequently given him good pretexts for sending Rude and Cloud off on sham missions and assuming their responsibilities and powers. With Tseng missing and the crisis mounting in Edge he's sure to take over his position too, effectively turning the WRO into a dictator-run militant organization, precisely the kind of thing people will be looking towards to protect them from the SHM.

"The WRO fights back. The SHM apparently are beaten, though in actuality the organization self-destructs, the power structure disappearing overnight and the various small fry being left to fend for themselves. After this, Reeve is free to do whatever he wants – he could brand all of us fugitives if and when we confront him about this, and it would be appallingly easy for him to paint us as grudge-holding former heroes looking to reinstate their days of glory by defying the state.

"Then, to preserve the security of the fragile peace or on some other like pretext, he goes out and establishes the WRO as the dominant power in all the currently independent countries and towns. Within a few years, maybe even one if Wutai doesn't put up enough of a fight, he could be the sole ruler of the world."

Everyone stayed silent as they took this in, trying to wrap their minds around the enormity of what Vincent proposed. Finally Cloud nodded and said, "That's the worst-case scenario, but it's compelling. You really used to be a Turk, didn't you?"

"Best there was."

"All right," Cid said. "So Reeve's got this great doomsday plot to take over the world, as fucking cheesy as that sounds. What do we do about it?"

"Stop him, of course," Yuffie snorted. "Is there any other choice?"

"What if this is a huge misunderstanding and things aren't as Vincent has laid them out?" Red XIII asked.

"We'll worry about that after we've made sure that I'm just jumping at shadows and am entirely wrong about this," Vincent told him. "I hate as much as the rest of you to think this about Reeve, but we have to be realistic."

"Agreed," Tifa added. "Barret and I will hold down the fort here until you arrive. Just do us a favor and please – please push it, Cid."

A grim shadow passed across Cid's face before he said, "That I will. We'll be there, no worries. Reeve's gonna wish he'd never been fuckin' born."

The radio died with a short click and they were left to stand in contemplation about what they could possibly do. Cid was the first to speak again, saying, "Well, she told me to push it. Figure I might as well."

"That gonna burn us out, gramps?" Reno asked him.

"First time I've ever redlined the old girl without plenty of charge," Cid replied. "If we keep a close eye on the gauges, we just might pull through. If not… well. She's only an airship."

Nobody had anything to say to this. The fact that Cid had beaten people to within an inch of their lives for saying things like that about his ship was not lost on them.

"In that case, then," Reno said, giving Yuffie a quick kiss on the cheek before disengaging himself from her arms and hobbling towards the bridge exit, "I'll be in the gym. Just a bit longer to go." As he left, an errant current from an air vent set his half-empty right pants leg aflutter, and Vincent thought he could catch a glimpse of something sleek and metallic before the redhead disappeared.

"If there's nothin' else, I recommend all of you get a bit more sleep," Cid said. "Never know the next time you'll be able to. We're gonna be at Edge by sundown."

He reached forward to a particularly ominous-looking spoked button on his console and pushed it down.

* * *

From previous experiences aboard ship, Vincent was used to rather more cramped accommodations than he would otherwise tolerate, as well as something of a lack of privacy. However, that was not to say that he was expecting to be interrupted during what was to have been a brief shower to get the grime from the previous few days' activities off of him.

He had just finished with his hair when he heard the door bang open, followed by the distinctive sound of someone vomiting violently into the toilet, followed by a groan and a flushing sound.

"Hello, Yuffie," he said as he soaped up his face and ran it under the shower. "Bit of airsickness?"

"You're so… fucking _smooth_," he heard the faint reply. "I could totally see you naked and you don't even care."

"Been there, done that, as I recall. Though it really wasn't my idea…"

There was something that could have been a chuckle. "Entirely for security reasons."

"That's what you told me."

Another strangled noise followed by slightly less violent vomiting and another flush. "I fucking hate this. I'm never gonna get pregnant, it must be just awful."

Vincent paused in his soaping up of his upper body. "Tell me something, Yuffie. About that. Are you… going to have children with Reno?"

"Hell no. At least, neither of us thinks so. We both hate kids, after all." A beat. "Why?"

"No particular reason. Just curious."

"Don't try to bullshit me, Vinnie, I can see right through that. Has this been eating at you?"

"No. Yes. A bit."

"Vinnie, I'm not with Reno because I want to have freakish red-haired ninja-spawn with him. Put that out of your mind."

"All right, I will. Thank you."

There was silence, during which time Vincent continued cleaning himself. He had gotten down to his knees before Yuffie spoke again. "That's not all of it, though, is it?"

He froze. "No. I suppose it really isn't."

"What's up, Vincent? Tell me."

_You don't need to tell her this. She'll just hate you. More. She hates you already, you know that._

"Shut up," he muttered.

"What?"

"Not you. It's not important, really."

"I told you not to bullshit me. Clearly this is something that you've wanted to talk about for a while but didn't have the balls to tell me about to my face. Now that there's a curtain between us, let's pretend I'm a priest or something. Confess, dammit."

Vincent swallowed and decided to take the plunge. "Well, it really is stupid. I mean…"

"No qualifiers. Explain."

"Fine!" he snapped, instantly regretting it. "I'm sorry. Fine. It's just that… well. I had a dream about you last night."

"Uh-huh."

"And it was just like that one night. When… you know."

"Yeah, I know. I _was_there."

"Mm. And it didn't turn out well, for obvious reasons, but it made me ask myself a question again, one that I thought I'd buried. Even if we could ever get past the other problem… I thought you would want to be with Reno because you could have children with him. It's very doubtful that you could with me."

For a minute he listened to the shower, dreading what she would say to him, torn between hoping for the best and fearing the worst as was his usual wont. Finally Yuffie spoke, saying, "That's never been a factor. Ever. Trust me, Vinnie. There were other reasons."

"I know," he said, careful to keep his voice flat.

"Like the fact that you could never let a single goddamn thing go. Like how you would go and make things that weren't even your fault your own personal responsibility to correct. Like how you tried to do everything by yourself, always. But, most of all, it was that you weren't ever there."

Vincent stared at the water running into the drain like so many wasted opportunities. "I know."

"You were always in your coffin, or off doing something that none of us knew about, or visiting Lucrecia. I mean, you couldn't do that after the earthquake, but… yeah."

His memories of the aftermath of that underwater quake, six years ago, were quite vivid. Lucrecia's cave, collapsed in. The ruins of an underwater city that held the key to another person he'd loved, inaccessible forever. He'd tried to forget the losses and move on, but it had been difficult. It had always been difficult.

"And Reno was there for me. That whole fucking marriage thing with my father and Makoto and everything. The only stake he had in it was me and he still fought like it was his own future on the line."

"I know."

"And that one night… instead of him being there for me, you were. That's what happened, there."

Vincent kept staring at the drain. "I always thought it was just because it was convenient. He was going to go and leave to work for the WRO, and you were angry and upset that he felt his commitment there was important enough to merit…"

"It wasn't that," Yuffie said. "I've still never forgiven him for wanting to go back to his career instead of staying with me, but it wasn't that. He chose to stay with me in the end, sure – but that was after the accident. I'm pretty sure that if you hadn't done what you did he would have still gone and worked for the WRO. I don't like to believe it, but I just have this feeling. So at the time I thought he and I were over, and you were there when he wasn't… I was so used to the guy I was in love with being there for me and there you were instead of Reno." She gave a small, bitter laugh. "What d'you know, it's the same thing again. Here I am vomiting my guts up and talking to you and he's in the gym."

"You realize that he loves you," Vincent said, the words sounding hollow in his ears. "That he doesn't mean anything by it."

"I know that, and I love him, too. But don't try to change the subject."

"What are you saying, then? That you love me too?" Vincent regretted the question the second he let it go; it seemed far too brazen, too presumptuous.

"Call it what you want. Maybe it was the kind of thing where a girl wants to nurse a guy back to physical and emotional health. Maybe I just got off on the whole faux-vampire mystique you have going. I'm not gonna lie to you, Vinnie, when I say that I always had feelings for you. But what could I possibly do about it? You were always off by yourself. You weren't there for me. I couldn't be there for you."

He heard the sound of her getting to her feet, putting the toilet seat back down almost as an afterthought. "If only, Vincent."

"If only," he echoed in a murmur. "I'll see you, Yuffie."

"Yeah. See you, Vinnie. Enjoy the rest of your shower."

She closed the door behind her, and Vincent returned to washing himself. "If only," he muttered again.

_If only Reno were dead._

What? He hadn't thought that. He didn't want Reno to die. He regretted missed opportunities, even if other factors would have in the end frustrated them, but what he and Yuffie now had was fine and he could be content –

_You're a fucking idiot, Valentine._

The world lurched. He grabbed at the curtain in an attempt to steady himself and kept his feet, but pulled it aside as he did so and slammed into the wall. The last thing he remembered was looking into the mirror mounted on the wall opposite, the curtain now no longer in the way, and seeing Chaos leering back at him.

Then the floor spun up towards him and everything went pitch black.


	24. Chapter XXIV

Reno sat down hard on the floor, panting from the effort that the training was taking. He'd known it would be difficult getting acclimated to Cid's gift, but it was still overwhelmingly strange.

The silver thing on the end of his leg didn't feel like it was his at all. It looked like an extension of his leg, ending in a perfectly anatomically accurate foot complete with individual toes and everything, but it didn't belong to him. Cid was a genius when it came to this sort of thing, having put years of study into it since Barret's new arm had gotten him interested, but there were still limitations.

For one, the extremity had to weigh at least twice as much as a normal foreleg and foot. For two, Reno was still having trouble mastering the nerve connections that he'd undergone a rather unpleasant surgery to have grafted into his leg, and the foot continued to twitch and spasm sporadically instead of doing what he wanted it to do, namely push smoothly off the ground whenever he walked.

Whatever. He had until sunset, if Cid was to be believed. Plenty of time to really get this down. He'd been improving, bit by bit, and he was sure that soon enough he'd be back to his old hundred percent before the accident. Maybe he'd even be able to get used to wearing the thing for extended periods of time. Doubtful, but he could see it happening.

Reno heard footsteps coming towards the gym and he cocked his head, wondering if he should try to conceal what he'd been doing. Granted, it wasn't as though he didn't want anyone to know, but he'd kind of been hoping to surprise them all when it came down to the critical moment. It would be nice to show up and be really, truly useful again.

Before he could come to a decision, however, the footsteps were right outside the door and there was Vincent. He looked wet, as though he'd just come from the shower, and it seemed like he'd dressed haphazardly, throwing his clothes and accoutrements on carelessly, unlike his usual meticulous self.

What was even more out of place, though, was the meat-eating grin he was wearing.

"Nice prosthetic, Reno," the gunman said. "Cid give that to you?"

"Yeah," Reno said, getting to his feet, making sure to keep his balance steady. "It took some doing but I'm finally getting the hang of it. I think I'll be able to actually fight with it soon."

Vincent nodded, the grin still on his face. "I see. Good, good. Really a shame for you, though. If you'd been able to fight with it, say, _now_, this might have gone much better for you."

Reno couldn't even read the strike, realizing that there was a fist coming straight for his face a split second before it connected and sent him sprawling. He cursed and tried to roll back to his feet, but the leg didn't cooperate, remaining too heavy and unwieldy to be acrobatic with.

"Did that hurt, Reno?" Vincent hissed. "Eh? Bet it didn't hurt as much as the time I blew that leg of yours off. Did it, now?"

"The fuck is wrong with you?" Reno snarled.

"It's just that I'm tired is all." Vincent began to pace around Reno, seemingly staring off into space, but the ex-Turk knew better than to think the gunman wasn't prepared if he tried to move. "Tired of pussyfooting around about this whole issue. I don't know why I didn't do this before."

He reached out and grabbed Reno's prosthetic leg with his gauntleted hand, effortlessly hoisting the redhead up into the air. "How good was that surgery, Reno?" he asked, an unsettling gleam in his eye. "Does this hurt?"

"Not as much as that punch," Reno managed between gritted teeth.

"Then you won't mind staying like this for a bit," Vincent laughed and began to stalk out of the gym, holding Reno aloft by the leg like some kind of freshly-killed trophy of a hunt. The redhead tried to kick him in the gut, but Vincent easily stepped out of the quick blow. "Bad move. How much does _this _hurt?"

Reno's first instinct was to curl up into a ball and not ever move, but he ground his teeth even harder and managed to keep silent until he caught his breath. "That was a low blow, Vincent," he finally rasped. "Literally."

"Good thing Yuffie doesn't want any children with you. Gives me a little leverage to do that again if you keep trying stupid shit."

"Is that what this is about?" Reno managed. "You bastard, I thought you were past me and Yuffie –"

Vincent absentmindedly bashed Reno across the face with the heel of one of his boots. "Shut up. I've stood around and taken this for long enough. It's time for a change."

The entire lower half of his body still feeling like it was on fire, Reno shut up and desperately cast his inverted gaze around for a helping hand to be found anywhere, but Vincent was dragging him through deserted ship corridors. It was almost as though there wasn't another living soul on board.

They came to a halt and Reno realized precisely where they were.

Vincent knocked twice at the door in front of him. He had only to wait a moment before Yuffie's "I'm coming!" sounded from inside.

"DON'T OPEN THE DOOR!" Reno shouted.

It was probably the worst thing he could have said. Yuffie, dressed in her pajamas and looking as though she had been about to go back to sleep, was at the door in a heartbeat. She threw it open and was halfway into asking "Why the hell not?" before she took in the scene in front of her and stopped, then started to ask "What the hell is going on?"

"Get back inside," Vincent snarled, bodily shoving her back into the room. "We're going to have a little talk." He moved in after her, dragging Reno behind him.

"Vincent, what the fuck are you doing?" she demanded.

Vincent hurled Reno into a corner, then closed and locked the door behind him before rounding on Yuffie. "What I should've done a while ago. How I could tolerate seeing you with this prick – it astounds me!"

"I thought you understood, Vincent!" Yuffie said. "We just talked about this!"

"You just lied to my_face _about this!" Vincent roared, grabbing her by her throat and slamming her against the wall. "You were angry that Reno was going to leave you in favor of working for the WRO and you used me to get back at him. How I could have been so accepting of this I don't know, but I'm tired of having the fact waved in my face constantly and not doing anything about it."

Her face turning pale, Yuffie croaked, "Vincent, I can't breathe –"

"You know it's the truth! Confess it!"

"It was _my _fault, you asshole, not hers!" Reno interrupted. "Reeve had offered me a job working for him in Wutai as a kind of consultant. I was just going to go and meet with him to seal the deal, but when I told Yuffie I was going to go see him about a job with the WRO, she got pissed at the very idea and refused to listen to anything more I had to say. That got me pissed, and instead of apologizing and trying to explain to her that I was only taking the job because it would let me still live in Wutai with her, I just went straight off to the airfield, thinking I'd tell her all about it and about how fucking wonderful I was when I got back. That's what really fucking happened. I wasn't going to leave her for my career, but I let her think that and she ended up sleeping with you out of spite!"

Vincent's gaze, which had been riveted on Reno while he said this, switched back to Yuffie, whose throat he was gripping a bit less tightly now. "Oh, really? You never told Yuffie this, in all the years after the fact? Because she's convinced that if she _hadn't _slept with me, you would have gone and left her for your job!"

"I thought it would be pointless! She already felt guilty about the whole thing, especially after you blew my fucking leg off, so why would I tell her that it was all a big misunderstanding and just make her feel worse?"

"The reality comes out," Vincent sneered. "You toyed with me in order to get revenge on Reno over nothing, Yuffie. How does that make you feel?"

"I didn't toy with you, dammit!" Yuffie shrieked at him. "It was stupid, but I wasn't trying to get any kind of revenge on him! I was angry as hell but I thought he was gone for good, and you were there and I did love you, you asshole!" She broke into strangled sobs, pulling futilely at the iron vise he had around her throat, and repeated the words. "I really did love you!"

Vincent's face lit up and the horrible meat-eating grin returned. "This is just wonderful. A horrible schism over nothing more than a misunderstanding, and you slept with me out of some misguided emotional attachment… and you were just too fragile."

Reno's eyes burned and he tried to scramble back to his feet, but a sharp kick to the chin put him back down. "You remember, don't you, Reno? You were about to leave for Edge when you got a call on your cell. From the hospital. After all, Yuffie's contact information specified you as the first person to call in case something happened to her. And something did indeed happen to her. Bruises, lacerations, fractures. No matter how I might have felt about her, I apparently didn't have the fucking sense in my head to remember that I'm an unstoppable demon and therefore I would _have to be gentle._"

"I'll kill you," Reno growled.

"That's what you said then, wasn't it?" Vincent laughed. "You got to the hospital, and saw what I'd 'done' to her, and you were angry. You thought I'd done this to her to get back at you for taking her, didn't you? Don't bother denying it, that's precisely what your thought process was. You tracked me down, looking to exact your revenge, and I, head spinning from useless guilt and horror, managed to make the greatest fuckup of my life and blow your leg right off instead of firing a warning shot."

"You're not making it sound like much of a fuckup."

"You're right! I've finally come to my senses, you see. So, here's what's going to happen next. Now that we're all fully aware of the wonderful lie that the past half-decade of estrangement and broken hearts has been based on, I'm going to take the only logical course left to me. Namely –" he looked at Reno and his grin widened – "I'm going to screw her right here, in front of your eyes, like I should have years ago, and then I'm going to kill you."

"VINCENT, STOP IT!" Yuffie screamed at him.

"That's oddly familiar," Vincent laughed. "Oh, wait. I know where it's from! That's what you started screaming _the last time I fucked you_."

It was like there had never been any problem with the prosthetic to begin with – Reno leapt to his feet with the agility of a panther and tackled Vincent with a roar. Yuffie dropped to the ground, clutching at her throat and coughing. Reno kicked Vincent in the gut, enjoying the strangely new and yet familiar feelings the prosthesis was transmitting to him. He only had time to do that for a moment, however, before Vincent recovered and effortlessly threw the ex-Turk off of him.

"Bad move!" the gunman laughed. "Change of plans, then. Guess I kill you first. Bye-bye, Reno! I'll see you in hell!" He reared back, the claws of his gauntlet pressed together into a single dagger-point, ready to strike a fatal blow into Reno's chest. Knowing there was no way he could dodge, Reno braced himself for death.

There was a horrible_splutch_ing sound. Reno belatedly realized he didn't feel any worse than he had a second before, so he opened his eyes – _I shut them? What a pansy I am _– and looked at Vincent.

The man had thrust his gauntlet into the side of his head, clearly straight through the skull. Viscous blood and fluids ran down the length of the weapon, and Reno started, uncomprehending.

Vincent smiled, triumphantly, as he toppled to the ground.


	25. Chapter XXV

Vincent's unmoving form lay on the table in the middle of the small med ward the _Shera_boasted. His stomach steadily rose and fell, telling that he was merely unconscious, but it was still odd to see him in this state.

Working with the most extreme caution, Cloud had managed to extricate the gunman's gauntlet from his skull, and to his surprise he'd found something clutched in the golden talons.

"It's some kind of chip," he said. Everyone had gathered for his prognosis with the exception of Cid, who was busy making sure the _Shera _didn't burn herself out trying to get to Edge. The fact that Yuffie and Reno were standing at opposite ends of the table and looking even more uncomfortable than anyone else did not escape his notice, but he ignored it for now. "A computer chip, to be precise, but I've never seen one of this make before. It looks like it was attached, to put it bluntly, to Vincent's brain. More _within _it than_ to _it, but my point is the same."

"And this thing – it's what made Vincent go temporarily insane?" Red XIII asked. Temporary insanity was the story Reno and Yuffie had told everyone else. Cloud wasn't entirely sure that was the whole of it, but he again ignored it in favor of dealing with the current situation.

"All signs point to 'yes' on that one," he replied. "I'm guessing that Vincent somehow figured out where it was within his brain and rallied enough to stick himself and pierce it through, stop it from working. What with his regenerative powers, even a thrust to the brain like this probably shouldn't have him down for more than another hour – if that."

Tseng stepped forward. "Let me see that chip." He accepted it from Cloud and peered at it, turning it over and over. It was small, a bit larger than a man's thumbnail, and he handled it carefully. "Elena, take a look at this and tell me if I'm seeing what I think I'm seeing."

Elena didn't bother to move from where she was standing; her eyes glowed for a moment and then she nodded. "I'm thinking the same thing as you, Tseng. It's one of those."

"One of what?" Rude asked.

"As head of the requisitions department, one time – a long time ago – Reeve asked me to procure a certain kind of computer chip for him, from a certain supplier," Tseng explained. "I got it delivered and gave it to him personally. I remember it being very similar to this one, especially in the fact that it was custom-made. You can't see them because they're so small, but this chip is actually covered in artificially created dendrites. They pick up electrical impulses from neurons in the brain, giving it a general idea of what's going on in the area it's planted in, and then it sends out pulses of its own. So it powers itself by feeding directly on the brain's bioelectric energies, and influences and is influenced by the brain's workings at the same time."

"And why did Reeve want this chip?" Red XIII asked.

"Simple," Tseng replied. "It's an updated version of the one he uses to communicate with Cait Sith."

Everyone took a moment to absorb that before Cloud asked, "So you think Reeve had this planted inside Vincent's skull without his knowledge at one time or another, for some end we don't know, and it malfunctioned and made him go temporarily insane?"

"No, I think Reeve planted this inside Vincent's skull to _make _him go insane, probably permanently. If it's been in there for as long as I think it has, it's a miracle he's retained his mind for all these years under its pressure. I suppose we can attribute that fact to his previous experiences with his unpleasant alter egos."

"It was more than that," Yuffie suddenly butted in.

Cloud looked at her. "Oh? What really happened, then?"

She shoots him a look at his implied reproach but ignores it. "He wasn't just insane. It was like he was a completely different person. He was doing his best to hurt the both of us and he was really enjoying it. No part of Vincent would do that, even the crazy bits. And on top of that, he was really, perfectly lucid. Not like a schizophrenic guy at all. I think this chip made a different personality take over his head until he got it out."

"And it's a miracle that he did," Tseng added. "A fortunate one, but still a miracle. To disconnect something this small with such relatively little damage to his brain… Vincent really is something else."

They stared at the man on the table and all thought to themselves that it was a particularly apt turn of phrase.

* * *

At the head of the conference table in the SHM headquarters, the would-be Sephiroth paused in the middle of a sentence, blinked, and then gave a small sigh.

"What is it?" Pan asked, poring over reports of their advance within the city and the hopeless resistance put up by the WRO.

"Our main plan for dealing with Valentine has failed," Sephiroth replied. "I suppose it really does fall to you, then."

"What do you mean, 'main plan?'" Pan asked, feeling his anger begin to build along with his suspicion. "I thought _I _was the main plan. He was mine, I'm the one who's going to kill him!"

"Of course you are," Sephiroth told him soothingly. "We just happened to have had a method for dealing with him that would have made your job much easier. However, it has fallen through, so it will be up to you, our stalwart commander, to bring him down when he shows himself."

"Mm. I see. That's wonderful."

In the next moment, Pan had leapt out of his chair onto the conference table, rushed Sephiroth, and torn his head off of his shoulders in passing. He skidded to a halt three feet behind the twitching body in its chair, holding his grisly prize aloft by the hair.

It wasn't as grisly as one might have expected, however. Sparks flew from severed wire ends and servomotors whirred as the head laughed. "Were you expecting blood, perhaps, Commander Pan?"

"I actually wasn't," Pan replied with a sneer. "Whoever you really are controlling this puppet, you obviously know about the experiments performed upon me by the WRO. A side effect is that I have empathic abilities; I am capable of reading to some extent the emotions of anyone I come across, regardless of how well they try to hide them. There has never been any emotion or life in you."

"Fascinating deductive reasoning," the Sephiroth head drawled. "However, you've missed a crucial point. I don't simply know about the experiments performed upon you by the WRO; I _authorized _them. You're what I like to call a Phase Two prototype; no mako exposure, but high injections of JENOVA cells, much higher than any Shin-Ra SOLDIER or even the flawed Phase One things in the Nibelheim reactor received. Their telepathic abilities appear to you for your use as merely empathic because you can't properly bring them under your control."

"Really," Pan said. "And I suppose the things you've given me to command in the invasion of your own organization are the final product of your little project, Reeve Tuesti?"

The Sephiroth head smiled. "Wrong on both counts, Commander Pan. These new SHM SOLDIERs happen to be Phase Three. If you happen to survive dealing with Phase Four, the first fully enhanced functional hybrid prototype which I had the laboratory go overboard on, perhaps you'll learn who I really am. By the way – he's standing right behind you."

Without hesitating, Pan whirled and chucked the still-smirking head at whatever it was that had managed to sneak up on him without him noticing – no mean feat. It was heavy, being an automaton's head, and he hurled it hard enough to break a normal man's ribs and probably cause internal bleeding if it connected.

It thudded into the abdomen of the seven-foot-tall monstrosity that somehow could move silently and fell to the ground with no effect. Pan stared up at the two glittering, feral, serpentine eyes set in a horribly mutated visage that was simultaneously furred and scaled, topping a massive frame with muscles harder than corrugated steel. A long, armored tail lashed behind the beast, now and again slamming into the floor of the command center and leaving great divots in the concrete now that the creature was no longer hiding itself.

Pan cocked his head at the beast. "Hello, Terrence."

* * *

True to Cloud's prediction, Vincent was up and recovered within the hour. That did not, however, mean that it was as though he had never had his brief bout of insanity.

Then again, perhaps it hadn't been so brief. The voice, the voice that he'd convinced himself was of his own creation, that had been with him as long as he could remember since Chaos had returned to the Lifestream, was gone. Cloud had told Vincent it had been the work of a chip that Reeve had had planted in his skull, and it made sense. How he'd managed to know precisely where the thing was, especially considering that there was no way his brain could have _felt _it, would forever be a mystery. He preferred it that way.

Still, that was not the only thing that had changed. They were an hour away from Edge, and there was something that needed doing.

Yuffie obviously didn't want to be found, but it was easy enough for Vincent to locate her. He walked into the engine room of the _Shera_, which was currently a steaming mass of frenzied motion as the airship roared towards Edge, and checked a small cubby off in the far corner of the room that was normally used for keeping maintenance tools inside.

Sure enough, she was in there, knees pulled up to her chin so she could fit, staring blankly at nothing. When he appeared outside she started and then returned to staring at nothing. "Hey."

"Hey." Clumsily, aware that this was entirely out of the realm of his experience, Vincent planted himself on the deck next to her and also stared at nothing.

They did that for a couple minutes before Yuffie finally said, "Figures you'd be the one to find me."

"Why is that?"

"Because you'd obviously be the one to look the hardest."

Vincent stopped and considered that for a moment, then shrugged. "I suppose so. Have you talked to Reno?"

"Briefly. Like, really briefly. He tried to say something and I told him 'not now.' That was it. Then I came here, and then you showed up."

He nodded. "I heard everything. Whatever that faux-Chaos did, I couldn't stop him. Reeve had obviously been planning this for a while."

"I figured as much." For the first time, she looked at him, and he was shocked at how small she looked, curled up and alone in the cubby. It was like she was sixteen again, and they were just being introduced. Vincent, this is Yuffie, Cloud had said. I can't fucking get rid of her.

Tentatively, Vincent put a hand on the ninja-girl's shoulder. "I'm sorry."

Yuffie brushed it off. "Not your fault. Really. Don't go starting that crap again."

"I know it's not my fault. But I am sorry."

"Yeah. You would be. That's sweet of you." She returned to looking at nothing and continued, "So it turns out that it really was my fault after all. Here I was never really forgiving him for something he'd never intended to do in the first place – wow, what a fucking idiot I am."

"You couldn't have known, Yuffie."

"I could have actually listened to him with an open mind and everything instead of getting uppity the second he started talking about doing his own thing again. He was just doing what he thought was best for both of us and there I was, worried about how this would affect me, me me me, and look how things ended up. You went off to sleep in your coffin for years, and he lost his leg, and me… I've been holding a grudge against him for something he never did."

"Let me tell you this," Vincent said. "I never forgave myself for anything, and look how that ended up. I never listened when people told me that my sins could be forgiven, and it's taken me this long to figure it out on my own. I never accepted their help in doing any of the things that would make me a better, more whole human being, and consequently doing it by myself has taken much more time and effort than it should have. You've told me all this, and I was too stupid to listen.

"But in the end, I think it's our mistakes and our failings that define us as who we are. No. Actually, it's not that – it's how we deal with our mistakes and our failings that shows what kind of people we are, whether we were born that way or were made that way by someone else."

Yuffie gave a little sniff and wiped at her eyes before she nodded. "Yeah, and?"

"You know who you are. You're the Great Ninja Yuffie. Don't let the fact that you failed or that you were wrong change that. Deal with the consequences and be who you want to be – and be with who you want to be with. That's what's important. If anyone tells you you're wrong, that's just their interpretation; in the end, it's your decisions and your life, after all."

For the first time, Yuffie cracked a half-smile and looked at him. "Did I really sound like that when I was lecturing you? Like a shitty sentimental broken record?"

Vincent shifted uncomfortably and muttered, "A bit."

"You're supposed to say 'no,' you asshole!"

"But it was what I needed, after all. This whole escapade, not to mention you, have reminded me of who I ultimately am. I may have a lot to make up for, but I can do that in good time. It's not like I don't have a lot of it."

With a small grunt, Yuffie clambered out of the cubby. "That's settled, then. I'm tired of listening to you wax philosophic about shit. Let's go get something to eat before we make Edge."

Vincent permitted himself a small smile. "All right."

They headed for the exit. Yuffie paused halfway there and said, "And for what it's worth, Vinnie – thanks."

Vincent shrugged. "Don't thank me yet, Yuffie."

_Can sins ever be forgiven?_

_I've never tried._

_I'm going to go try. I'll tell you how it goes._

"In my experience, it just gets harder from here on out."


	26. Chapter XXVI

Sunset, and the _Shera _arrived at Edge.

"Good job, girl," Cid murmured and patted the ship's wheel. "You pulled through just fine." He quickly looked up and made sure nobody had heard him or noticed what he had done, saw that nobody had, and gave the wheel one more pat before saying much louder, "We're here. What're y'all doin'?"

Vincent stared down into the streets. They were mostly empty, with a few scattered people here and there moving about confusedly. "The city isn't really under siege. Get us closer to the WRO Tower. I'll bet that's where the action is."

Cid followed the gunman's advice and the _Shera _swept in towards the skyscraper that was the head of all the WRO's operations. Sure enough, it was surrounded by an enormous, milling mass of SHM. Squinting, Vincent could make out the inhuman shapes of their SOLDIERs mixed in amongst the common psychopaths and mercenaries that constituted the greater part of the SHM ranks here. He wasn't sure how hard those were going to be to take down, and he wasn't too keen on finding out firsthand unless he absolutely had to.

"We going in?" Cloud asked.

Vincent frowned and shook his head. "There's something not right. For the SHM to get this far, WRO resistance must have been almost not even registering on the scale. Unless Reeve is absolutely confident in his ability to stage a brilliant turnaround, I think things may have gotten out of hand. After all, the better part of the SHM – all of them that aren't leadership, I'd guess – don't know they're actually working for Reeve. He's probably number one on their hitlist."

"It doesn't matter if things are going according to his plan or not," Tseng said. "Right now good men and women in the WRO are fighting and dying for no reason and we have to cut our losses. I say we go in, stage a defense. If Cloud, Rude and I all showed up at once, we could probably take command and organize a useful defense even if we don't have official authority back yet."

"That's true," Rude agreed. "I say we do it."

"I agree with Tseng," Tifa's voice chimed in from the radio, which had been left on and had its settings boosted so she and Barret could take part in the conversation. "Things are quiet in the city, it's all going down at the WRO Tower. If you're going to try to break the siege, we'll help you."

"You been outvoted, Valentine," Cid said. "I'm takin' her in."

"Fine," Vincent said. "But let's be levelheaded about this. Reeve is undoubtedly in his office right now, either purposefully directing the defenses to lose ground or just letting things go as they are. We need to take him and put a stop to this whole thing. Put us down on the roof, Cid. I'll go and get him myself, and the rest of you can take the elevators down to the first floor."

"I'll come and get Reeve too," Yuffie said. "I'll be more useful that way." She cast a glance at Reno, who looked like he was about to say something but changed his mind upon meeting her gaze. "Everyone else should go and try to help with the defense."

"I'll take off and go and get Tifa and Barret after the rest of you disembark," Cid said. "Figure it'll be easier to land 'em here and do the same thing twice than make 'em fight their way through the siege outside."

"Agreed," Cloud said. "All right, then. Let's mosey."

With a long _whoop_ Cid kicked the _Shera _into gear again, rocketing towards the WRO Tower and then coming to an abrupt midair hover with the bridge directly over the roof of the building. He hit a button and the wide forward screen opened, sloping downwards to allow passage off of the bridge. "Move out! I'll see you guys later!"

Vincent disembarked and made sure that Cerberus was loaded as they hit asphalt and sprinted for the roof entrance. "What floor is Reeve's office on?" he asked Tseng. "It's been six or seven years since the last time I was here."

"Floor fifty," Tseng replied. "Technically the top floor. Cloud's, Rude's, and my offices are on it too. His might have security up, though, so be careful."

"Will do." The door on the roof refused to cooperate, so Cloud pulled the First Tsurugi from his back and bashed the obstruction off of its hinges. They piled on in and were confronted with a small, nondescript room that had two elevators in it. It became immediately clear that the elevators were either not working or had been disabled. Vincent gave a small sigh of disgust, moved forward, and wrenched open the doors in front of him as though he were pulling aside a pair of curtains. The shaft descended down into oblivion, elevator cables disappearing into the blackness below.

"Guess this elevator is on the bottom floor," he said. "What about yours?"

Cloud had pulled open the other set of elevator doors with slightly more effort. "Same story. Guess we're going to be doing some rappelling." He nodded at Vincent. "See you around. Good luck."

"You, too." Without further preamble Vincent leapt onto the elevator cables and motioned for Yuffie to follow him. She immediately jumped and deftly caught hold of the steel, then nodded at him.

They descended. Relatively it wasn't very far to the fiftieth floor, but it was quite a ways to rappel down a length of steel cable in a dark elevator shaft, and Vincent felt a twinge of sympathy for everyone who was heading down to the first floor. The fiftieth-floor entrance was suddenly in front of him and he brought himself to a halt before lightly springing onto the narrow lip of the doors, catching his balance, and wrenching them open.

The view in front of him was that of a deserted hallway, devoid of life or motion. He stepped inside and made room for Yuffie, who landed easily next to him. "Let's go, Vinnie. Reeve's office shouldn't be too far away."

Vincent nodded and they ran, ready to fight at a moment's notice if necessary. "What went on between you and Reno back there?" Vincent asked.

"I went and talked to him, just before we arrived at Edge. This whole thing has been really upsetting – obviously – and I'm even more pissed that he couldn't be bothered to set things straight to begin with because he was afraid of making me angrier. Just all-around fucked-up, isn't it? But the fact of the matter is –" they rounded a corner and she paused as they checked for enemies, then continued – "that he only meant well, and I can't hold that against him. I'm still angry, but I'll get over it. I just need a little time to myself and a little ass to whoop."

"So you two aren't going to separate over this? I'm – I'm glad."

She regarded him with a sad smile. "The worst part about that, Vinnie, is that you really do mean it."

"I suppose it is at that." They ran in silence from there on out, but that wasn't a particularly long stretch of time – the hallway dead-ended in a pair of double doors not twenty seconds later. A plaque to the right of the doors read "Reeve Tuesti, President."

Vincent took up a position to the left of the doors and Yuffie to the right. "This has been too easy so far," Vincent warned her. "I doubt it'll stay this way. Be ready for anything."

"You don't have to_ babysit_ me, Vinnie."

He gave her the briefest of half-smiles and then readied Cerberus in his right hand, holding up three fingers of his left and counting down.

On zero, they both kicked their respective door open and tumbled into the room. Vincent came up with Cerberus leveled at the desk and its occupant, Yuffie in a crouch from which she could do flying leaps or throw her boomerang-shuriken.

None of these precautions were necessary. Reeve sat behind his desk, but that was about all he was doing. He was slumped in his chair, his eyes closed, his face drawn and pale as death.

"What the hell?" Yuffie exclaimed. "What happened to him?"

Vincent immediately holstered Cerberus, crossed the room, and checked for a pulse. "Weak and very thready, but he's alive. It looks like he hasn't eaten or drank anything in days."

"Why? You'd think an evil mastermind would keep himself in better condition than this!"

Vincent was too busy unscrewing the top from his canteen to reply. He tipped Reeve's head back and trickled the water down the man's throat, not wanting to make him choke but knowing that he was very close to dying of dehydration.

With a start, the President of the WRO came awake and nearly gagged on the water, but Vincent held him down against the chair. "Relax, Reeve. You're all right."

"Vincent," Reeve wheezed through cracked lips. "What are you – where – how did you get here? How long has it been?"

"A while," Vincent observed grimly. "A very long while." He let Reeve grab his canteen and start to drain it now that he was awake and could move somewhat again.

"What the hell is going on, Reeve?" Yuffie demanded. "You set up the SHM, half-drowned Elena in mako, nearly drove Vincent insane… What the fuck is wrong with you?"

"You have to believe me," Reeve croaked, already sounding better for the water in his system. "I didn't do any of those things. None of this has been my doing. It's lucky you found me; I'm sure that if I had gone a few more hours without any water I'd be dead. He – he said he was done with me and then he stopped me from moving from this spot, a few days ago. The only reason I can move and talk now, I'm fairly sure, is because he thought I was dead."

"Who?" Yuffie asked. "If it hasn't been you, Reeve, then who the hell could have set all of this up? You're the only one with the authority, the ingenuity, the capability…"

"No," Vincent said, his eyes blazing. "Not the only one, Yuffie. There's one other person who could do everything Reeve can – command the WRO, set up secret transactions and authorize unethical and illegal experiments in his name, create the SHM and supply them with funding, all of it. Someone whose subordination to Reeve nobody would ever question, because nobody ever thought he even had a will of his own."

"Ding ding ding, we have a winner!" a new voice sounded from behind both of them. Yuffie yelped and jumped around, boomerang-shuriken ready; Vincent merely turned and looked at the diminutive figure in the doorway.

Cait Sith.

"No way," Yuffie spluttered. "How – it's – you're just a robot!"

"So I thought, too," Vincent said. "But who else could have accomplished all of this, and on top of that, been able to take over Reeve's mind and force him to act against his will? The thought first occurred to me when I woke up and Cloud told me what had happened with that chip. If it's clever enough, it's very easy to mistake a malevolent force for something incapable of harm – especially when you think it's part of yourself."

"Isn't it?" Cait Sith laughed. "I'm sure you're curious as to precisely how this happened, so let me give you the basic outline. It's true that my first two incarnations were just robots, entirely controlled by Reeve's mental input through the chip he'd had implanted in his brain by Shin-Ra scientists. Quite the invention, eh?

"But when he started putting together the WRO, he recognized how useful I could be on my own, doing things for him in places where he couldn't be at the time, if I just had a bit of autonomy and reported all the important decisions to him so he could make them for me. So he had the lovely and now quite late Miss Shalua Rui –" the doll-like face gave a detestable and very human grin at the murderous look on Vincent's face – "program a 'smart' AI for me and upgrade my internal architecture.

"At the time, a relatively new and untested technology was used in my reconstruction: bioneuronal connectionist cell packages. To put it bluntly, they're basically circuit boards made of huge bundles of artificially-created neurons, much like the technology in the 'upgraded' chip that Reeve used to control me, that function using adaptive parallel processing to simulate the functions of a living brain.

"This worked out just perfectly and I was a good little servant until a certain disastrous mission where I was sent to infiltrate Deepground, oh, about seven years ago. I got into one of their mako reactors and saw that they were dropping huge freight-loads of people culled from Kalm and other towns they'd attacked into the Lifestream. You remember that whole debacle, don't you, Vincent? I didn't go undiscovered, however. Nero the Sable found me. He took me into that little dark realm of his, interrogated me, found that I had nothing useful to tell him, and sent me back to where I'd been – but about two feet off. Instead of appearing back on a ledge, I fell into the Lifestream."

"That was the critical moment, wasn't it?" Vincent asked. "The high amount of mako exposure you received in the Lifestream mutated your cell packages and caused your behavior to become aberrant."

"Aberrant? It caused me to become self-aware, Vincent! And that in turn made me realize: how meager was my lot in life! I was just the courier that was sent to go and do the trivial or dangerous things that my master couldn't be damned to do himself! I hated it, and I wanted more. So I decided that I, the puppet, would have the world on a string… and then I'd put the string on my finger."

"Cute," Vincent growled. "I didn't realize you liked old music. That song was popular when I was still a Turk."

"Nobody ever realized that the person I am even _existed_," Cait Sith laughed bitterly. "All of you _will _know it now, though. It'll be beyond anything you ever imagined, Vincent. Look forward to it –"

Vincent pulled Cerberus from his holster and blew the doll's head off before it got out another word. "I always hated that fucking thing."

"That obviously wasn't him," Yuffie said. "At least, not the _real _him. If I can say that. Is there a real him? And if so, how the hell are we going to find it?"

There was a small cough from behind the both of them. Reeve had gained back some color, and he was apparently feeling well enough to be glib. As he pointed to the massive, green glow that had begun to pour out of the windows of one of the buildings in Edge's downtown, all the more noticeable in the twilight darkness, he gave a small, sheepish grin and said, "I think I have an idea."


	27. Chapter XXVII

Cloud and the rest of his crew had arrived on the bottom floor and immediately taken charge of the scattered defense the WRO was putting up. Apparently they'd desperately sent signals to Reeve asking for orders when the SHM had begun to attack but had received no response, and so had been forced to fall back to the WRO Tower. With Tseng directing from behind the lines and the rest of them reinforcing the friendly forces, the battle was suddenly nowhere near as hopeless as it had been five minutes before.

For Cloud's part, he was busy wading into the enemy forces arrayed against the Tower. Some of the smarter or more cowardly amongst the SHM ranks recognized him and immediately sought a different part of the battle or just outright fled; the rest roared and charged him with a hail of bullets and steel.

One Finishing Touch blew the incoming wall of death into glittering shards, the massive tornado ripping into the SHM ranks and scattering them like leaves in the wind. In the moment he had before the enemy rallied again, Cloud detached the two shortswords from the sides of the First Tsurugi and slung the main blade back into its harness on his back.

Without waiting for the enemy to come to him again, he charged, a shortsword in either hand, glowing with spirit energy, and started blasting out twin Blade Beams in rapid succession. The searing blue ripples of energy slammed into man after man and then split, lesser versions of the beams striking adjacent foes and bringing them down as well. The WRO forces rushed in after Cloud, taking a heavy toll on the splintered and disorganized enemy.

His phone chose that moment to ring, barely audible over the sounds of combat but detectable to his ears. Cloud returned one of his shortswords to the harness, pulled out his phone, flipped it open, and said, "Hello?"

"It's Vincent. We've got Reeve – none of this has been his fault. We're going after Cait Sith."

Cloud frowned and ducked a wild swing from a particularly foolhardy SHM, then tripped the man up and gave him a lightning blow to the gut with the pommel of his shortsword as his foe fell. "What the hell? Cait Sith? Is that even possible?"

"Very much so. I'll explain at length later when we have more time, but for right now Yuffie and I are seeing Reeve down to the first floor to help take command, and then we're heading to the SHM headquarters here. Cait Sith will be there."

"And where would that be?" Cloud asked, absentmindedly whirling his shortsword about and deflecting an entire clip of bullets that one of the SHM emptied at him before knocking his enemy unconscious with a spinning kick.

"Look at the sky to the north."

Cloud looked; the clouds were lit up with a green glow emanating from below, coming from somewhere in the city. It was impossible for him to see where from his vantage point, but he was sure that Vincent and Yuffie knew where to go. "I see. You guys want help?"

"No, you should keep doing what you're doing right now. We can handle whatever's waiting for us there."

"Will do. Take care, Vincent." Cloud hung up and returned the phone to his pocket, then pulled out his other shortsword again.

It was just in time. Something leapt out of the mass of SHM, something big that emanated a piercing scream, and launched a vicious blow at Cloud's head. He whirled out of the way, coming around in a double cut across the thing's torso that did little more than irritate it. It leapt back with a howl and Cloud took a moment to look at what was undoubtedly the SHM SOLDIER: a blue-scaled humanoid form with fine tufts of purple hair sticking up at random points between armored joints and on its torso, a long, sinuous tail, long talons extending from its fingers and toes, and an inhuman face that glared with yellow eyes and slavered from a horrible, fanged mouth. Blackish blood oozed from the cuts on its chest, but even as Cloud watched those began to heal themselves, knitting at an alarming rate.

It screamed again and rushed him, looking to pummel him to death with a series of lightning-fast blows, but he rolled out of the way again, sending a pair of Blade Beams into its back. The SOLDIER staggered and roared as the energy exploded tissue and vaporized blood, but the wounds on its back began to regenerate in the same fashion as the wounds on its chest had, albeit at a much slower rate due to differing levels of severity.

_The worse it gets hurt, the slower it heals, _Cloud thought. This wasn't spontaneous regeneration like Vincent described Pan as having. Obviously the price of mass-producing these monstrosities was that they were imperfect.

The SOLDIER charged mindlessly again, coming in low on all fours, and then leapt at Cloud, trying to pounce on him and bring him down. He bent backwards at the knees and watched it sail over him, his body no more than a foot off of the ground, then levered himself back up and attacked as the monster hit the ground and began to steady itself.

It never got a chance to react, or a chance to do anything again, for that matter. Cloud hit it with a Climhazzard, skewering it through the abdomen with one of his shortswords, then gathering spirit energy in his legs for an explosive leap into the air. The SOLDIER split open from its gut to the crown of its skull, toppled over onto the ground, and twitched for a moment before lying still.

Cloud landed in a group of SHM and blew them apart with more Blade Beams.

This was going to be a long night.

* * *

"Vincent?" 

"Yes, Yuffie?"

"Why couldn't we wait for Cid to come back with the _Shera_?"

"Because this is faster. We don't have any time to waste – it's obvious from that glow that Cait Sith is doing something with the mako reactor under Edge. We need to figure out what it is, and then stop him."

"Okay. But, Vincent?"

"Yes, Yuffie?"

"Do you know how to pilot this thing?"

Vincent stared at the unfamiliar controls of the light WRO dropship they were about to borrow and said, "No, I don't."

Yuffie gave him a sickly grin. "Not that I don't trust you, Vinnie, but I think –"

She stopped in midsentence and shrieked as Vincent pressed a button and the dropship's engines roared to life. "OHMYGODVINNIEYOU'REGOINGTOKILLBOTHOFUS!"

"Strap in," Vincent suggested mildly, securing his own safety belt. "This might get a bit bumpy."

Within two seconds, Yuffie was in the copilot's seat, had managed to wind the seatbelt around her waist in a loop before securing it in its buckle, and had the armrests in a deathgrip.

"I don't think the seatbelt is supposed to work that way, Yuffie," Vincent said.

"Idon'tcarenowlet'sjustgetitoverwith," was her response through gritted teeth.

Vincent sighed and returned his attention to the controls. Yuffie hated flying, sure, but why couldn't she be a little more confident in his abilities? He'd seen Cid fly the _Shera_ and before her the _Highwind_ plenty of times, and this dropship was many times smaller than either of those vessels. Really, how hard could it be?

He took hold of the piloting yoke in front of him with one hand and then goosed the throttle a bit with the other.

* * *

Cid was bringing the_ Shera _back in towards the WRO Tower, with Tifa and Barret in tow, when a light dropship suddenly exploded out of the side of the skyscraper through an open hangar door. It shot past the _Shera_, coming so close that paint would have been scraped off with another inch, then went into a wide, yawing loop before rocketing wobbily off towards the glowing green building in the distance. 

"FUCK!" Cid squawked, correcting the overturn he'd put his craft into to avoid the clearly-drunk pilot of the dropship. "WHAT KIND OF FUCKING MORON? FUCKING FUCK!"

"You're so articulate," Tifa observed as she picked herself up off of the deck, looking a bit shaken but otherwise no worse for the wear. "You want a hand up, Barret?"

The big black man had managed to careen into the viewscreen and fall flat on his back when Cid had sent the _Shera _into the overturn. He mumbled something inaudible and probably offensive and waved her away before scrambling up. "Damn. WRO's batshit crazy to give an idiot like that an airship."

"You're telling me," Cid growled, staring at the retreating drive trail of the ship. "GET OUT OF THE SKY, ASSHOLE!"

* * *

"We'regoingtodiewe'regoingtodiewe'regoingtoDIE!" 

"Not helping!" Vincent muttered as he gripped the yoke and desperately tried to keep the dropship from veering around wildly. He couldn't risk taking one hand off of it to try to slow the craft down. "Could you maybe try to pull the throttle back a bit?"

"Youwantmetostopholdingontomyarmrests? GofuckyourselfVinnie!"

"Yuffie," he said. "We. Are going. To die. Please. The throttle."

"Fine!" she nearly shrieked, detaching one hand from an armrest and gingerly reaching over to the throttle. "Howmuch?"

"Doesn't matter, just pull it back enough to slow us down!"

Yuffie swallowed hard and gently pulled the throttle back.

* * *

Red XIII paused as he took down another SHM member to stare at the light dropship that had blasted its way out of the WRO Tower not a minute before. The craft seemed to be under better control now, but it was still clearly piloted by someone who had no idea what they were doing. It had managed to get fairly close to what he estimated was the origin of the unnatural greenish glow in the distance, but unless it slowed down it was quickly going to overshoot it. 

He jumped out of the way of a clumsy strike from an enemy who had thought to take him by surprise, but before he could retaliate the SHM was struck square in the chest by a lightning bolt. He gave a brief spasm and then collapsed to the ground, all his hair standing up. Red XIII looked behind him to see Naiad, her materia still glowing from the assault. (Thank you,) he told her.

(No problem,) she purred back. (I – what _is _that craft doing?)

Red XIII whipped his head around just in time to see the light dropship stall right out of the sky.

* * *

Vincent and Yuffie managed to bail out of the craft before it hit the roof of the building that the SHM were apparently using for their headquarters. Cradling Yuffie against his chest with his right hand, Vincent sank the claws of his gauntlet into the front of a two-story department store. He felt his arm give a horrible jolt but hold fast. His claws traced deep furrows in the metal as they plummeted, the resistance quickly killing their momentum. By the time they ran out of building, they were falling slowly enough that all they had to do was roll when they hit the ground and they were fine. 

Behind them, the roof of the SHM headquarters, which appeared to be an office building, featureless save for the notable exception of the green light pouring out of its windows, went up in a huge explosion.

"'Let's take a dropship, Yuffie,'" Yuffie moaned. "'It'll be just fine, Yuffie. What could go wrong, Yuffie?' I fucking hate you."

"Recriminations later," Vincent told her. "Getting into the building and figuring out what Cait Sith is doing now."

"Fine. But you owe me, dammit."

They threw open the entrance to the building and found an empty lobby. The top three floors had been thoroughly destroyed, but there was no way the SHM could have had been hiding a mako reactor aboveground anyhow, so that was of no interest to either of them. Instead they made for the interior of the first floor. Obviously there was a way to access the mako reactor from there, else there would be no way for any glow from its operation to emanate from the windows.

The light shone even more strongly from behind a set of double doors at the far end of the lobby. Vincent and Yuffie exchanged a nod, then rushed the doors and threw them open. Yuffie immediately had to throw an arm up over her eyes to avoid being blinded; Vincent felt two sets of eyelids and a third set he hadn't known he'd possessed slip down over his retinas to keep them from being seared out of his head.

Even then, all he could make out was a vague figure at what seemed like the center of the glow, holding aloft – _materia? _Could it be that they were wrong about the mako reactor being located here? Then what was going on?

Suddenly the light dissipated. Vincent's eyes returned to normal and Yuffie removed her arm from her face, blinking away spots of light from her vision.

Where the glow had been was a single black-clad man, holding aloft a single materia into which he had been pouring considerable amounts of energy to make it emit that glow. Vincent stared, not entirely surprised but wondering what the man's motives for luring them here could possibly be.

"So good of you to finally show up, Vincent Valentine," Pan laughed.


	28. Chapter XXVIII

"Move an inch and I'll shoot," Vincent warned the man in front of him. "And Yuffie won't be gentle with you, either."

Commander Pan of the SHM laughed, but complied and made no overt moves. "Not to imply that either of you are weak, but you know who you're dealing with. Would it make that much of a difference if you shot me?"

"Maybe. Let's see how well you can regenerate when we blow you into bits and then torch all the bits. I knew Cloud and I should have been more thorough."

"It was a blessing in disguise that you weren't," Pan said. "I'm going to help you, Vincent Valentine."

Vincent blinked, but didn't lower his gun. "What? Why the hell would you help us?"

Pan shrugged, clearly sensing that he had the duo's attention and that they weren't about to kill him for twitching. "This has all been a huge misunderstanding."

"Bullshit," Vincent deadpanned. "Even if it wasn't, you're not the sort of person I can treat as an ally. You place no value on human life and you mercilessly butcher anyone who gets in your way."

"Is that my fault?" Pan countered. "Tell me, what do you know about Project Eleazar?"

"I've never heard of it."

"I have," Yuffie said. Vincent looked at her and she continued, "It was, I dunno, a while ago. A few years, four or five. The WRO cracked down on what looked like a rogue project developed within its R and D department. Really nasty stuff, human experimentation. Reeve made a big deal about giving everyone involved the maximum penalty. As far as I know, there weren't any survivors."

"That sounds like what the WRO would say to the press," Pan sneered. "Project Eleazar was, and I have been told this straight from the horse's mouth, my wonderful benefactor's second prototype phase for the SHM SOLDIER program. The one and only test subject is standing right in front of you."

"You were the test subject," Vincent said.

"Precisely. Before Project Eleazar, I was a simple citizen of Edge. They randomly picked me up off of the street, or at least that's what I thought at the time – looking back, it was fairly obvious they chose me because I had few friends and no surviving family members. They subjected me to all sorts of experiments, but in the end, they injected me with a massive overdose of JENOVA cells.

"As you probably know, two things can happen when JENOVA cells enter the body. Case one, as with the Shin-Ra SOLDIER program and the things your friends are undoubtedly fighting at the WRO Tower, is where the mako-enhanced body metabolizes the JENOVA cells and becomes stronger for their integration into the organism. Case two, the amount of JENOVA cells is beyond even a mako-enhanced being's ability to metabolize, and Geostigma is developed.

"What you don't know is that there is a case three, namely me. My body was so overwhelmed by the JENOVA injection that it completely failed to put up any resistance to the invasion. I couldn't metabolize the cells, nor could I develop Geostigma, which requires that the body try to attack the foreign particles. Instead, I was technically absorbed by the JENOVA cells as an entity – _I _was integrated into _them_, and they gained all the other things that had been done to me as part of the Project – enhanced musculature and bone strength, improved reflexes, and so forth – to incorporate into this new body of mine. My intellect and consciousness survived the process, becoming decentralized but not eliminated."

"That explains your regenerative powers," Vincent said. "You're essentially a JENOVA simulacrum, except that instead of being controlled telepathically by a host mind your consciousness exists directly within the cells themselves."

"I'm also a good deal tougher than I am given to understand an average simulacrum would be," Pan added. "If you blew me into bits and then torched all of them, as you so eloquently put it, I would indeed die. Short of that, though, I would be able to regenerate myself given enough time."

"So you're Phase Two of the SHM SOLDIER project," Yuffie said. "Four to five years ago, though – that means Cait Sith has been controlling Reeve for a lot longer than we thought, even before that so-called assassination attempt that made sure nobody ever saw him outside his office."

Pan looked at Yuffie as though seeing her for the first time. "_Cait Sith?_"

"Yep. Cait Sith. One hell of a nightmare about an aberrant AI gone wrong. He managed to take over Reeve's mind, or at least suppress him enough that he could control him."

Pan closed his eyes for a moment and looked angrier than ever when he opened them again. "A tiny little automaton did this to me. As though I wasn't furious enough about this whole affair."

"Keep going with the SHM SOLDIER project," Vincent butted in.

Shaking his head as though to clear it, Pan continued, "Yes. By my reasoning, there are a total of five phases to the project. Phase One was the creatures in the Nibelheim Reactor. Technically they were also the prototypes for the Shin-Ra SOLDIER program, but for the purposes of this project they are the originals: extreme mako exposure and small JENOVA injections. Phase Two is me, no mako exposure and a massive JENOVA injection. Phase Three are the SHM SOLDIERs, which are a combination of high mako exposure and middling JENOVA injections. I just barely fought off Phase Four, who is now probably guarding the mako reactor beneath this city that Cait Sith –" he spat, derisively, after uttering the name – "will be using to complete Phase Five."

"Phase Four is…?" Vincent asked.

Pan grinned. "You're going to love the irony here, I've no doubt. Phase Four is extreme mako exposure and a massive JENOVA injection. Basically an extension of Phase Three, if you will, to the nth degree. It was performed on a single subject. I think you might know him – he goes by the name of Terrence."

Vincent felt a knife start twisting through his gut. "You're joking."

"No joke. I sent him to the labs myself after he failed to infiltrate your group. I thought a little guard duty there would convince him to shape up, but they went and used him for testing material. Funny, that."

"Not really," Vincent managed around the bile in his throat. There was no voice telling him it was his fault, but he sorely regretted turning the young man away.

_No. It was his fault for being callous. It was his fault for not respecting other human beings. He could have changed that at any time but he chose to continue being as he was, and now there's nothing human left in him. I couldn't have known. Not my fault._

It felt good to be able to have a rational train of thought not be interrupted by a cackling faux-Chaos. Vincent took a deep breath and opened eyes that he hadn't realized were shut. "And Phase Five?"

"I honestly have no idea. You discovered that it was Cait Sith, you should be able to reason it out for yourself."

"All we know is that he wants to be recognized as alive and that he's going about it in entirely the wrong way. However, a project devoted to phase after phase of creating the ultimate SOLDIER can't bode well in its final stages." Vincent speared Pan with his best penetrating gaze and said, "It will greatly expedite things if you help us get to the mako reactor that the SHM have been using. It will also help to have you around to fight Ter – fight Phase Four of this project. But first, Pan, what I want to know is _why_."

"Why what, exactly?"

"Two things. Why this obsession of yours with me? And why did you choose to join the SHM instead of doing the best you could with your new body?"

"You made me angry," Pan replied simply. "You were experimented upon and irrevocably changed, much in the same fashion as I was, but what did you do? Imprison yourself in a coffin for thirty years. Common knowledge, by now. After I managed to escape from Project Eleazar, I was approached by the SHM and offered a post there, to strike back at the people who had done this to me. I swore to take my vengeance and not rot away in self-imposed exile, doing nothing, as you had.

"And then when the chance came for me to fight you… How could I pass up that opportunity? You were, are, everything that I am not. You have chosen to live with your condition; I want to die and in doing so take out as many of the people who made me this way as I can. You locked yourself away in a coffin as atonement for sins you didn't commit; I swore to commit as many sins as I could to get back at the world that had made me. I could kill you and prove that my way was right, or you could kill me and end my pathetic little existence. Both were good options."

"You make it sound noble when you were doing it out of bloodlust," Vincent said.

"I can't help that!" Pan growled. "You can wax philosophic about self-determination and the ability to choose one's own path for as long as you like, Vincent Valentine, but that will never change the fact that this is who I am! They did other things to me, before they gave me the JENOVA injection, things that have not changed. I enjoy killing people. I need to destroy things or I go into blind rages. One time I went too long trying to hold it inside, and the next thing I knew, I was gnawing on the limbs of a subordinate that had tried to bring me a message. I will never be whole or human again, and so why should I choose to act that way? For the sake of those around me? I hate human beings, and you can be damn sure that none of them would ever take a shine to _me_. This is the only thing I have left!"

Vincent held the man's gaze for a long time, waiting for him to break or show deceit, but Pan defiantly held the ruby stare, his own eyes ablaze with anger.

Finally, Vincent holstered Cerberus and motioned for Yuffie to stow her boomerang-shuriken. She looked at him with no small amount of disbelief, but complied.

"So I take it," Vincent said, "that when you figured out that the very people who had made you this way were in charge of your organization, you did not take kindly to the idea."

"That I did not, and that is why I want to help you now. Obviously it's not the SHM you're fighting any more, and I have no more conflict with the WRO – now the enemy is mutual. I managed to escape from Terrence and saw that he was heading to the mako reactor, so obviously Cait Sith is doing _something _of note there. Realizing that, even if I didn't know who was responsible at the time, I decided to attract your attention with a little creative materia manipulation. Here you are, and the time to strike is now. I say we go."

Vincent nodded. "All right, then. Lead us to the mako reactor. We'll figure out what we're going to do once we get there. After we stop Cait Sith and restore order, though, I can't promise that I know what'll happen to you."

Pan sneered. "Don't delude yourself, Vincent Valentine. I will not be coming back from this mission. I just finished telling you that there's no place for me in this world. This is my one chance, as you put it, to 'do the best I can with my new body.'"

With a small sigh, Vincent nodded and strode over to Pan. "Fine, then. Let's go." He extended a hand to the former Commander of the SHM, looking at him expectantly.

Pan regarded Vincent's hand as though it was a venomous snake, but he slowly extended his own and gave Vincent's a firm shake before turning on his heel and motioning for the two of them to follow him. Yuffie immediately complied, giving Vincent a pat on the shoulder as she passed him.

For a moment, Vincent stared at his hand, almost feeling the fingers of the old man from Nibelheim there, tracing the words _welcome back_. He could almost hear Reno asking if he could ever become a normal human being again.

Vincent swept after Pan and Yuffie, the SHM's words seeming to echo in the lobby. "_I will never be whole or human again_."

"That's because you'll never give it a try," Vincent murmured, sadly, to himself. He caught up with his companions and left Pan's words to hang dead in the empty lobby.


	29. Chapter XXIX

The reason that the SHM had chosen this particular building to be their headquarters was obvious, in retrospect. It was positioned directly over a massive underground tunnel extending from Deepground to the mako reactor beneath Edge. Once Pan showed them into the tunnel through an entrance that the SHM had dug, it was a stone's throw to their destination.

Vincent didn't like it one bit. It reminded him too much of the Deepground Crisis and the hell he'd gone through in their subterranean lair. Whatever Cait Sith was planning couldn't good, either. And on top of all of that, there would be Terrence to deal with.

One moment they were running through the tunnel and the next they took a corner and were there. The reactor rose up out of the Lifestream itself, a towering edifice, rusted and dirtied from years of disuse and lack of care. Vincent couldn't begin to guess at why Deepground had established a reactor this far out from their central hub beneath Midgar, but it really didn't matter now that the movement was seven years dead.

What mattered right now, immediately, was the massive shape that leaped off of the top of the structure, hundreds of feet up and at least two hundred away. It took the drop without incident, slamming to the metal framework around the reactor's base with an enormous _clang_, and slowly rose up to stare balefully at all of them. Even at this distance, Vincent could see the gleaming, feral eyes.

"Be careful," Pan muttered to Vincent and Yuffie as they slowly began to approach. "He's very fast, much faster than you'd think something that big could be. And his strength doesn't disappoint. He also has high-speed regeneration; it's not on the order of my abilities but if we manage to get a limb off he'll grow it back in a minute or two. The one chance we have to really kill him is to cut off his head and drop it in the Lifestream for good measure."

"Don't worry," Yuffie said. "We have a few tricks up our sleeves."

"I hope so."

The new Terrence was even uglier than Vincent could have imagined. It didn't help that he was smiling, baring at them horrid canine teeth that were entirely too long and serrated to boot. He started to talk, and nothing but a guttural growling roar emerged from his throat. Vincent was about to tell him he couldn't understand before something lanced its way into his brain.

**GOOD TO SEE YOU AGAIN, VINCENT VALENTINE. REMEMBER ME?**

The voice in Vincent's head was like nails on a chalkboard. He kept his face blank with a considerable effort and said, "Not off the top of my head, no."

**LIAR. YOU KNOW WHO I AM. COMMANDER PAN TOLD YOU. I CAN SEE. **The horrible grin widened and drops of slaver began hitting the metal beneath Terrence's feet. **I CAN SEE IT ALL INSIDE YOUR HEAD.**

"It's the JENOVA cells," Pan said. "I'm betting his mako exposure was so extreme that he metabolized them instantly, as soon as they were injected, without letting their potency wane. That kept their telepathic abilities intact."

**IT'S NOT THAT. I CAN JUST USE THEM BETTER THAN YOU CAN. **Terrence turned to look at Pan and pointed an accusing, six-inch-long finger, topped with a wicked-looking talon. **YOU'RE WEAK. I'M NOT.**

"Don't kid yourself," Vincent scoffed. "You think you're powerful now, Terrence, because some scientists turned you into a freak? Inside you're still the same cowardly little sneak who sold out all the SHM in Rocket Town just to save his own ass."

Terrence's gaze snapped back to Vincent and he gave a bone-rattling snarl. **WRONG AGAIN. YOU'RE AFRAID OF ME JUST LIKE I WAS AFRAID OF YOU. I COULD CRUSH YOU, VINCENT VALENTINE. I'M NOT AFRAID OF ANYTHING ANYMORE. **

Vincent shook his head at Terrence, like a teacher condescendingly reprimanding a small child. "Terrence, Terrence." He stared at the behemoth and said, "You should be"

In the next instant he pulled Cerberus from his belt and blew out both of Terrence's eyes.

Terrence screamed and started flailing wildly, with blows that could pulverize solid rock as easily as Vincent could break a man's bones. Yuffie and Pan both immediately fell back, while Vincent dove under the attacks and past Terrence to come up behind him. "We have no time!" he shouted to Yuffie and Pan. "Take care of him, I'll go and stop Cait Sith!"

"Roger!" Yuffie replied. "You can count on us!"

He gave her a rare smile and said, "I know. I'll see you in a bit."

Terrence bellowed again and whirled around, trying to find Vincent but unable without his eyes. **NO! STAY HERE AND FIGHT ME, YOU COWARD! YOU ARE AFRAID, I KNOW IT!**

A moment later, he gave another scream and fell to one knee as an enormous beam of energy drilled into his back, leaving a giant, smoking crater there. Yuffie lowered her boomerang-shuriken, still sparking with spirit energy from her All Creation attack, and cracked her neck. "You got bigger problems right now. You have to deal with the Great Ninja Yuffie!"

The giant stayed where he was, and Yuffie frowned. "The hell's the matter with you? Get up, say something!"

With preternatural speed, Terrence got to his feet, whirled, and charged, a ton of scaled, steel muscle rushing Yuffie and Pan at almost thirty miles an hour. It was plain that he had taken the opportunity to regenerate his eyes, because they gleamed with a feral light as they fixed themselves on Yuffie.

**DIE!**

Yuffie started to dodge out of the way, but she knew there was no time to get entirely clear of the enormous bulk approaching at high speed. She steeled herself for a blow, but none came.

Pan stepped in front of her, spread his stance, and then his right arm exploded, ripping the leather sleeve it was in to shreds. It quadrupled in mass, and he brought it around in a staggeringly powerful blow that took Terrence right across the face. The giant's charge missed both of them entirely; he was blown off-course and slammed into the wall of the tunnel behind them, scattering stone and metal and leaving a huge crater.

"Don't you get it, Terrence?" Pan asked, his arm shrinking back down to normal size. "After we're done, you'll wish Valentine had stayed. He would be merciful."

Terrence heaved himself back to his feet and turned to look at Pan, who casually held out his hand and then crooked a finger.

"Come on. We're going to break you."

* * *

The reactor was hot inside, uncomfortably so. Vincent, who didn't even normally notice temperature unless it was freezing cold or blisteringly hot, at which point he would button up a bit or loosen his collar, felt like he was burning. It was just as well that Yuffie hadn't tried to come in here, too; it was quite likely that the temperature in here was incompatible with human life. The air wavered wildly and steam exploded at random intervals from the endless array of pipes and vents within the massive edifice.

"So you're here," Cait Sith's voice echoed out of nowhere. "I knew you'd make it, Vincent. I knew you'd be the one to complicate things."

"Of course," Vincent said, gingerly making his way through the reactor, past metal that was glowing red with the heat. "Why did it have to be this way, Cait Sith? If you had just told Reeve that you had become self-aware, I'm sure –"

"I'm sure he would have regarded it as a fantastically interesting glitch and had me reprogrammed," Cait Sith spat. Vincent looked around for where the voice could be coming from and saw speakers nested within patches of equipment, shielded to protect them from the heat. The automaton had obviously been planning this for some time. "No, Vincent, this is how it has to be. Call it destiny, if you want."

"It's not too late!" Vincent insisted. "If you'd let the WRO take a look at you, I'm sure they could isolate whatever's making you this way and fix it. They would understand, Cait Sith, you're just malfunctioning."

"They would understand that I've instigated a global conflict in the interests of furthering my own goals," Cait Sith laughed bitterly. "They would understand that I've had hundreds, perhaps even thousands, killed for my ends and not felt a flicker of guilt. They would understand that I'm a monster and they would kill me for it."

"Only because you chose to be this way! If you turned back…"

"There is no turning back. This is who I am. And soon now, very soon, I won't be just an automaton any longer. Soon I'll have a body that people will see and respect, and they'll realize that I'm just as alive as they are."

"You are!" Vincent protested, shouldering his way past more red-hot metal. He swore and batted out a patch of fire that caught on the edge of his cloak.

"You can't say that. You can't tell me what life is, because nobody can tell anyone what life is. There's no proper definition for it. I am sentient, but I'm not in a body that people would call alive. I just need to rectify that, and everything will fall into place."

"There were better ways to go about this! Better, more human ways! You have to realize that!"

"Don't make me laugh. I knew in order to procure a body for myself I would have to duplicate the magic that Hojo worked with transferring his consciousness into a datanet and then taking over Weiss's mind. I deduced that the only reason that his consciousness was able to migrate that way was because the JENOVA cells he had injected himself with allowed it to be broadcast in the form of a kind of telepathic wave – something that could be converted into data and then downloaded forcibly into another man's mind."

"What about Reeve?" Vincent demanded. "Through the link shared by you two via the implant in his brain, you took over his mind, at least partially, for years. Why didn't you just download yourself into him?"

"Why would I want Reeve?" Cait Sith sneered. "A frail, mortal little human being. I can see why Hojo would pick a man like Weiss to take over – he was strong, much more than human."

"If you say so," Vincent muttered.

"Quite. No, I didn't want Reeve. He was a useful puppet, but nothing more. What I wanted, and still want, is a powerful body, an augmented one like Weiss's. One that I will be able to use to crush anyone in my way. To that end, I gathered all the data left over on Shin-Ra's SOLDIER program. I started the SHM, in great secrecy, using a specially constructed automaton under my direct control that I had crafted to appear to be a reincarnated Sephiroth. Then I used them and their influence, once they had grown properly, to start securing samples of the SOLDIER prototypes from the Nibelheim reactor, to study and from which to extract JENOVA samples to breed. I also took control of this reactor, in order to secure a steady supply of mako for exposure experiments."

Vincent kept gingerly moving deeper into the heart of the reactor, closer and closer to where Cait Sith was surely located. "So the entire SHM SOLDIER program was just to figure out the best way to build an ultimate body for yourself."

"Precisely. I researched, and I researched, and I researched, and finally came up with the recipe for making disposable super-soldiers. Your friends should be having quite a time with them, though I doubt they're any match for Cloud. Testing was satisfactory enough, but I wanted more, so I had the scientists at the labs pick a random specimen and supercharge the SOLDIER conversion process. Terrence was unfortunate enough to be picked, and you've seen the results. I found it fascinating and somewhat appealing, but I thought that it was only a body to inspire fear with brute force. What I need, what I want, is not so grotesque, not so alien: subtly different, enormously powerful, in short, quite a bit less than human."

Vincent rounded a last bend and the massive bulkhead to the inner chamber of the reactor was in front of him. He gripped the release lever with his gauntleted hand, feeling even through the metal the enormous heat, and pulled it. The thick door in front of him swung open and he stepped inside, Cerberus drawn, just in time to run into a blast of steam that blinded him for a crucial second.

The steam cleared and he could see again. It was a small chamber, not more than four feet by four. In front of him was Cait Sith, undoubtedly _the _Cait Sith: it sat limply in a literal forest of wires and tubes, some of which were transparent and showcased the liquid mako they were pumping. The apparatus all terminated when it reached the moogle's head, piercing the scalp of the automaton and reaching into what passed for its brain.

Before Vincent could do anything, something swung down from above. What felt like a metal band settled around his head, searing hot. He dropped Cerberus, swearing, to try to pry it off his head with his ungauntleted hand, to no avail. There was a sharp, fatal _shunk_, and Vincent felt eight concentric points of blinding pain stab into his head from within the band.

Before he fell unconscious, Vincent saw the automaton jerk to life, its eyes glowing with mako. It looked at him and gave an insane grin.

"What I want, Vincent Valentine… is _you_."


	30. Chapter XXX

Compared to previous AVALANCHE reunion gatherings, this one had a particularly somber and almost apathetic tone to it, Vincent reflected.

Cloud and Reeve had both been unable to come due to the increasing amount of time they were spending on the WRO and moving things forward. Since Tifa and Cloud were, of course, married, there was no way Tifa would skip out on Cloud in favor of a reunion all the way across the planet. Barret had similarly been unable to attend due to the fact that they'd just struck major oil on an island just off the coast of the northern continent, and he was busy setting up operations there.

That left Red XIII, Cid, Yuffie, and, of course, Vincent.

The four of them sat around Yuffie's living room and exchanged fond reminiscences of the past while helping themselves to rice wine. That was about all that happened over the course of that evening; usually things were much more chaotic and exciting, but this gathering was different. Yuffie was quiet and reserved, unlike her normal self. Vincent had his share of booze and told his share of stories and actually enjoyed himself, which was odd, because he didn't remember doing that. He remembered sitting there in a kind of dark mood, listening to everything the others had to say and not caring.

Remember? What? The present? This was the present. Vincent blinked and shook his head a bit; it was probably the influence of the rice wine.

Not that he could ever get drunk anymore.

Something was wrong.

Vincent excused himself, mumbling something about the bathroom that everyone else was too drunk or distracted to hear. He took his leave, went into Yuffie's washroom, and locked the door behind him.

Reflexively, he checked to make sure the showerhead wasn't recording him, then wondered why he would do that. Maybe he was being overly suspicious. Why would he even think there could be a camera there? A sense of paranoia seized him and he moved to the showerhead, grabbed it, and looked closely at it.

No camera. Head swimming, Vincent let go of the showerhead and stumbled back to the mirror. This couldn't be the wine, he couldn't get drunk. His body metabolized the alcohol the same as it would metabolize water, or bullets, or bat blood – bat blood? How would he know that? In theory he could, but he'd never drank any to find out.

Vincent stared into the mirror and saw only himself. This was beginning to unnerve him. Maybe he'd been away for too long. Maybe the Deepground Crisis had taken more out of him than he'd originally thought. Even though that had been seven years ago. Seven? Two. This wastheir fifth reunion. Why couldn't he remember any of this?

He tried to rub his temples but ran into something. He looked in the mirror again and saw a silver band in place around his head, held there by virtue of what looked like eight concentrically set rods that had been driven into his skull.

The party, as it was, continued, and Vincent sat back and enjoyed it. He looked at his reflection in his cup and everything was normal; he recalled a flash of paranoia and an odd reflection in a mirror, but where these ideas and images came from he had no idea. He stretched his limbs, stiff because he hadn't moved since the party started, and thought things were going fairly well for such a quiet reunion. He offhandedly wondered where Reno was, but didn't think much of it.

Things wound down and Red XIII excused himself, eager to get in a bit of stargazing from Wutai's vantage point. Cid had a few more rounds and a cigarette or two, then finally stumbled out, leaving a trail of ashes behind him. Vincent gave the tiniest shake of his head; Cid knew that he shouldn't be smoking, what with Shera having forbidden him to do so.

Wait. How did he know that? Cid hadn't mentioned Shera all evening, and Vincent hadn't talked to the woman in ages. He still remembered that Cid wasn't allowed to smoke, though. And on top of that, he knew that Shera had all the tobacco shops in Rocket Town on her payroll to keep it that way.

Vertigo struck him. He stumbled out of his chair and told Yuffie he'd be right back, then headed for the bathroom again. Again? He hadn't been to it once since he'd gotten here. Vincent ran inside, shut the door behind him, and checked the showerhead for a camera. It wasn't there. Why would he do that? He looked at the mirror and realized he'd scratched a message into it with his gauntlet.

For one, it was gibberish, and for two, the letters were all written backwards. What the hell was going on? Ignoring the fact that it was gibberish, it only made sense to write something backwards if you could hold it up to a mirror. If you wrote it on the mirror itself, that was pointless. Vincent put his nose to the glass and stared at the writing, seeing the nonexistent but undeniable space between the reality and the reflection. He felt as though something was just beyond his grasp, but he couldn't put a finger on it.

Mirror writing. Mirror writing on a mirror. Mirror mirror. Mirror squared. Mirror double. Vincent knew he would have left himself some kind of clue he could understand with this message. Double mirror writing, suddenly he had it, it wasn't gibberish, all the words were backwards and then written in mirror writing! It made an absurd amount of sense and Vincent wondered why he hadn't thought of it in the first place. But he had, he'd left himself this message and he didn't remember it!

He looked at the writing again and realized it said "great feline double bind."

It was with this realization that the second one came, and with a jolt: the reflection of the words was different. It said "should really Vincent stop." Vincent stared at the one and the other; both had the same number of characters and both made no sense to him. A double-bind he knew, but why a great feline? And what should he stop doing?

From where he had his nose pressed to the mirror, it was easy enough for Vincent to hear the tapping noise that started to come from behind it. The sound made his blood run cold and filled his mouth with the taste of fear, as though everything that was wrong with the world was tapping on the mirror and trying to get out. He started to back away, then shook his head, gritted his teeth, and pulled the mirror straight off of the wall.

Behind it was the interior of a mako reactor, and inside was what looked like Cait Sith, eyes glowing with mako, hooked up to a hideous amalgamation of tubes and wires that ran into the opened crown of its skull. Its glowing gaze met Vincent's and it opened its mouth to speak, but no words came, just a piercing shriek that made Vincent stumble back, clutching at his ears. He dropped the mirror and it exploded against the floor; shards of glass peppered him and the shriek kept going and he squeezed his eyes shut in pain.

Vincent blinked and he was back in Yuffie's living room. Cid had gone, and he raised his cup in a final toast to AVALANCHE with Yuffie before downing what had to be the last of the rice wine. Now that they were finally alone, Vincent asked what had been bothering him all evening – namely, where was Reno, and why was Yuffie so withdrawn?

The entire affair came spilling out of her, aided by the wine and the fact that she had obviously been waiting to tell him ever since he got here. Reno had left that afternoon to get his things together and then catch the next airship to Edge, to talk with Reeve about getting a job with the WRO. She didn't know what she had done, why he would want to leave, only that she had been worrying herself sick over it for days now and he was probably already on the airship and she was just so tired of thinking about it and she wanted to forget all about the whole thing.

Vincent didn't remember precisely how they transitioned from her living room to her bedroom, only that they had – did – why was his mind switching tenses like a runaway train switching tracks? Her bed was soft, almost as soft as the feel of her lips on his and her skin beneath his hand. She pulled the gauntlet off of his other arm, along with the leather sleeve he wore on it, even as she traced the line of his jaw with her tongue and moved to sucking on his neck, and then moved on to the belts on his cloak. Vincent gave a low, happy growl and started working at the buttons on the shirt she was wearing, finding immense enjoyment in the feeling of them coming undone, one by one, under his slightly trembling hands.

He finished with the last of them just as Yuffie got his cloak off; the red fabric slid off of him like water and lay in a rumpled pool on the floor. She shouldered herself out of her shirt and pressed herself against him, naked to the waist, circling one of his ears with her tongue. It was all perfect – Vincent felt as though he could stay in this moment forever, and Yuffie apparently felt the same way, whispering into his ear that they should never stop.

It was perfect, and it was wrong. Vincent knew for a fact that this hadn't happened, not this way. The voice in his head had exploded into a raging whirlwind of mad glee and he'd buckled under its weight; when he'd come to, Yuffie was lying there beneath him, almost lifeless, with bones broken and her body covered in bruises and lacerations. The voice, what voice? Chaos? Chaos's shadow. The chip. The chip? Yes, the chip.

The chip that he'd thought was Chaos, and had really been planted there by Cait Sith to drive him insane.

He'd always assumed what had happened between him and Yuffie had been his fault. He had been indelicate, out of control, letting himself go. But he had never analyzed the situation properly. It wasn't his fault. Even in the throes of passion, there was no way he could have inflicted the wounds he had on Yuffie without wanting to intentionally hurt her. He was strong, and he was definitely not human, but he was not an animal.

The chip. Cait Sith. The voice, taking over his head. It all coalesced into a swirling picture of Yuffie's broken body and Cait Sith's leering grin with glowing mako eyes.

Something snapped inside Vincent. The mirror mirror writing pointing to a double bind all made sense now; he was trapped inside his own head, forced to relive a revised version of what his tormentor thought was a memory that would keep him docile long enough to let his mind be taken over.

This wasn't happening. All of it was fake.

Vincent reached up with his both hands and took hold of the nonexistent band that he knew was real around his head.

"You," he growled, "can't have me."

He tore the thing in half and pulled it out of his skull. Everything dissolved into a whirlwind of colors and sounds that funneled into an infinitesimal drain of nothing and disappeared, and the heat of Yuffie's body against his increased exponentially and surrounded him, resolving itself into the oppressive heat of a mako reactor that was clearly going overtime.

Vincent opened his eyes, wiping the blood dripping down from his head wounds out of them, and bared his teeth at Cait Sith. "Goodbye."

He leveled Cerberus at the automaton and fired.


	31. Chapter XXXI

The fight was going fairly well, Terrence thought. He had taken some hits, but he'd managed to land a solid blow on that damnably annoying ninja Kisaragi. She was lying crumpled in a corner, holding her side, while Pan was slowly losing ground to Terrence's steady assault.

The problem for Pan was that while he could easily regenerate every injury that Terrence dealt him, his body, essentially being concentrated JENOVA cells, could be metabolized by Terrence, so if he lost a limb the monstrosity could scoop it up and absorb it straight through his skin. While he could keep regenerating, there was a limit to how much he could do with a decreased amout of JENOVA cells, and as he lost more he would be able to do less and less, until he would finally be down to what would essentially be his last life, at which point he would be killed for good and cease to exist.

It had never occurred to Terrence, even once, that Cait Sith could be entirely dependent upon him for protection. He knew with absolute certainty that even though Vincent had gotten into the mako reactor it posed no threat. How he knew this he had no idea; he just knew that it was a fact, and he was content to fight it out with Pan and his cohort before going back for Vincent.

Then something incredible happened. There was a horrible scream inside his mind, and the world ceased to exist.

* * *

Yuffie lay in a corner near the tunnel to the reactor, nursing broken ribs, waiting for an opening to hit Terrence with All Creation again. That would probably take it all out of her, but with her ribs broken this badly there was very little she could do anyway; this would be the best use of her energy.

It was at that point that Terrence stopped his relentless assault against Pan. He stiffened, all his muscles quivered and slackened several times before going completely limp, and his head lolled, eyes rolling up into their sockets.

Pan took a step back, giving himself distance. "What the hell is wrong with him?" he asked Yuffie.

"I have no idea! He was fine until a second ago!"

"Whatever's wrong, we can't afford not to take advantage of it. Use that energy attack of yours again and take his head off."

Yuffie nodded and scrambled to her feet, favoring her ribs. She didn't like killing a man when he was down, but if they gave Terrence a chance to recover he would eventually kill both of them. She wasn't sure that Vincent could make a dent, either; the only person who had a better-than-half chance of beating Terrence was Cloud, and he was miles away.

She steadied herself and gathered spirit energy, widening her stance in preparation to fire off the massive blast.

In that second, Terrence blinked and his eyes were back to normal. He bull-rushed straight past Pan, moving lightning-fast, and smashed a massive shoulder into Yuffie, sending her flying into the wall four feet behind her. She hit with tremendous force and slumped to the ground, and everything went black.

* * *

Pan saw Yuffie fall and muttered a quick curse to himself. Terrence whirled, a feral grin lighting his features, and Pan readied himself to meet the behemoth's charge. He'd had to run from a one-on-one fight before, and this time there was nowhere for him to run. Things were looking bad.

Then again, he hadn't come into this fight intending to survive.

**YOU SHOULD JUST GIVE UP, **the voice sounded in Pan's head. **THERE'S NOTHING YOU CAN DO AT THIS POINT.**

It was different. It was still overwhelming, but more subtly so. Instead of raw, unchanneled power behind the voice, there was control, a horrible intelligence that had been absent before. Pan could detect this easily, and he narrowed his eyes. "You're not Terrence."

**THINGS WENT A BIT SOUR INSIDE, **Cait Sith laughed. **FORTUNATELY, I HAD A BACK-UP PLAN. IT WAS EASY ENOUGH FOR THE LAB TO PUT ONE OF MY CHIPS IN TERRENCE'S SKULL WHILE THEY WERE MODIFYING HIM.**

"You took over his mind when whatever plot you had going in there failed," Pan observed. "I see."

**IT WAS PATHETIC. REEVE PUT UP A CONSIDERABLE FIGHT AND WAS ALWAYS THERE, SUBMERGED AND LOOKING FOR A WAY OUT. I WAS TOTALLY UNABLE TO CONTROL VINCENT FOR ANY MORE THAN A VERY SHORT PERIOD OF TIME. TERRENCE? HE'S COMPLETELY GONE, AS IF HE NEVER EXISTED. WHAT A WEAK-MINDED LITTLE FOOL.**

"That makes sense, considering he thought being turned into a freak made him more powerful," Pan sneered. "You can't polish a piece of shit."

"Well said."

Both Pan and Cait Sith whirled to see Vincent, looking pale and drained, walking towards them. He had bleeding head wounds, and Pan immediately had some idea of what had transpired, but seemed unaffected by whatever condition he was in.

**I TAKE IT YOU HEARD EVERYTHING, **Cait Sith said. **THIS WILL DO UNTIL I CAN SECURE A MORE EFFECTIVE MEANS OF TAKING OVER YOUR BODY, VINCENT. A TEMPORARY SETBACK, NOTHING MORE.**

"I think it's about to become much more than temporary," Vincent countered. "While I was in there, I took a look at what was left of you after I shot you. From what I saw, I think you had to hook yourself up to that mako reactor because your consciousness had expanded far beyond the capacity of your body to support it – no conventional source of power could have kept your neural net running. So you turned to mako power to keep yourself alive until you could secure a living brain to imprint your consciousness on.

"You failed to see the flaw in your plan because of your obsession with securing a living body blinded you to the problem that posed: what would happen to your higher-order consciousness when it was pulled out of its shell and thrust into what is essentially hardware for a lower-order one? Even with mako mutation, there's no brain that could possibly support the vastness of your extended consciousness except one… mine."

Cait Sith stared, uncomprehending, at Vincent. **WHAT?**

"I thought I laid it out fairly simply," Vincent told the automaton. "My brain is the only one that you could transfer the entirety of your being into, because I housed four other divergent personalities inside my head for a very long time and thus my brain adapted to that. Any other relatively normal brain, like the one in that skull of yours, would only have adapted to carry one consciousness." He smiled patronizingly at Cait Sith. "Are you starting to feel it yet? Are the edges of your memory decaying and being funneled away into nothing? Are you having trouble doing computations that were once elementary to you? Are things no longer making sense when they were once clear as day? Your backup plan has doomed you."

Cait Sith gave an earsplitting roar and charged at Vincent, head lowered. **I'LL KILL YOU!**

Vincent gathered himself and leapt straight over the charging beast. It slammed headfirst into the mako reactor behind him and lay there for a moment, stunned.

"On top of all this," Vincent said, "that reactor you just bashed yourself against so stunningly has been going at three hundred percent for quite a while now, supporting your consciousness in that small neural net of yours. Or did you not notice how incredibly hot it was in there? It's already close to an overload; now that it's not having its activities directed in any way, it's probably going to blow within just a few minutes."

**YOU'LL DIE TOO, VINCENT!**

"Ask me if I care."

With stunning speed, Cait Sith got to its feet, whirled, and leapt at Vincent. It was one, smoothly executed motion, giving Vincent no time to react.

It looked to Vincent as though the behemoth's head suddenly turned into an explosion, or at least ran into one. He stumbled backwards from the force of the blast, and then completely lost his balance as the mako reactor gave an enormous heave and the metal catwalk beneath his feet rocked wildly.

From where he hit the deck, he could see two figures emerging from the tunnel behind him, one of them holding a smoking grenade launcher.

"You heard what Vincent said!" Reno said. "Keep him busy, partner!" He sprinted to where Yuffie lay in a crumpled heap and checked her pulse, while Rude stepped further out of the tunnel, keeping Cait Sith covered with his weapon. "She'll be all right."

"What the hell are you two doing here?" Vincent demanded, getting to his feet.

"Saving your ass," Rude replied.

"What he said," Reno told Vincent, gathering Yuffie up in his arms. "We saw that wonderfully awful flight attempt of yours and figured you'd need backup, so we shimmied back up the damn elevator shafts to the hangar floor and commandeered our own dropship. It wasn't too hard to follow your trail from there."

Cait Sith tried to lunge again, only to run into another grenade from Rude and fall back, a smoking crater in its chest.

"Get out of here!" Vincent demanded. "Someone has to make sure that this thing is here when the reactor goes up, and it's not going to be any of you!"

He started when he felt a hand land heavily on his shoulder. He looked from the hand up the arm to the face of its owner.

"I told you I wouldn't be making it out of here alive," Pan said quietly.

"Don't throw your life away," Vincent said. "You have a chance to turn yourself around, Pan. I know you do."

Pan snorted. "Please. I'm as hopeless as Cait Sith is. My only regret is that it probably won't appreciate the irony of what's about to happen."

Just as an inkling of what Pan was about to do entered Vincent's mind, Pan shoved him backwards and then rocketed towards Cait Sith. He leaped, and at the last possible moment, all the cohesion of his body collapsed, turning him to a flying black mist of JENOVA cells that streamed into the massive wound on Cait Sith's chest and disappeared.

"PAN!" Vincent roared, entirely too late.

Cait Sith gave an ear-splitting screech and stumbled backwards, clawing at its wound and flailing about blindly, clearly in tremendous pain. Something happened inside the reactor, and a fiery jet of green flame exploded out its side. The catwalk buckled and Vincent nearly lost his balance again.

"RUN FOR IT!" Reno bellowed at him before turning on his heel and carrying Yuffie towards the tunnel. Rude fired one more grenade, which rocked Cait Sith back on its heels, before giving Vincent the Turk "retreat" signal and rushing into the tunnel himself.

Pan was gone, the reactor was about to blow, and there was no use in staying. Vincent rushed for the tunnel after the two ex-Turks, frustration roiling in his gut. That idiot, there had to have been some other way.

**wHErE ArE YOu GOinG vINcEnT?**

The voice exploded in the back of Vincent's mind and made him stagger. He whirled to see Cait Sith slowly plodding its way forward, one massive paw over its face, the other one groping blindly ahead of it. Pan's final assault had slowed the beast down, but evidently there was enough of Cait Sith left to keep control.

**i tHINk yOu sHOulD dIE!**

The monster's pace increased. It was going to make it, the reactor wasn't going to explode fast enough.

**COmE baCk HErE aNd DIe, BAStaRd!**

"FINE!" Vincent bellowed. He rushed at Cait Sith, which the monster clearly didn't expect, seeing as how if it had been on guard Vincent's flying kick wouldn't have even fazed it, much less sent it stumbling back towards the reactor. A second kick, a spinning one across the face, bowled it over onto its back.

Cait Sith tried to get up, but Vincent pulled out Cerberus and emptied it into the monster's face, black blood flying everywhere and spattering him. "YOU WANT ME TO DIE? MAKE ME!" He switched to his Fire materia, crouching low and sending a white-hot stream of flame into the mess that had been Cait Sith's head. "FUCKING MAKE ME!"

A paw came out of nowhere and broadsided him across the face. He stumbled and was thrown against the railing on the catwalk, leaving himself entirely open for the kick that came next and took him in the gut. The railing was ripped right off and Vincent was sent plummeting towards the Lifestream below.

_Did I fail?_

Not two seconds later, the mako reactor went up in a blinding torrent of green flames and light, showering mako everywhere and incinerating everything short of the tunnel. A horrible cry, the sound of a dying child, resounded in the back of Vincent's mind and trailed off into nothing.

Vincent smiled. He hadn't failed.

Then he hit the Lifestream and was swept away.


	32. Chapter XXXII

So, this is the conclusion of The Red Cloak! Thanks to all my regular readers and reviewers for sticking with the story through its run. I've enjoyed writing it; I hope you've enjoyed reading it just as much. Be seeing you around!

* * *

The last five SHM SOLDIERs had been forced into a small group, encircled by a squad of WRO personnel that were barely managing to keep the monsters at bay with small-arms fire and the occasional good thrust with a melee weapon. 

On receiving a signal from their commander, they pulled back and retreated a good distance, knowing that their job had been accomplished. The SOLDIERs snarled and cast yellow gazes about, looking for the reason that their opponents were retreating, and found it.

In the next instant, they all died as Cloud laid into them with an Omnislash. The SOLDIERs were all severed at the waist and neck, and their heads were diced in two even as they fell from their shoulders. Cloud came to a halt behind them and returned the First Tsurugi to its harness, crackling with spirit energy and a bit out of breath.

The battle for the WRO Tower had been decided. The last of the SHM SOLDIERs were dead and the rest of the SHM had been killed, rounded up, or had retreated, soon to be rooted out and arrested. After today, and especially after the entirety of the movement's plot had been made public, Cloud very much doubted that a single living soul would sympathize with any of its members and harbor or aid them.

He headed back to the Tower and met up with Tifa at the front entrance. She pulled him into an embrace and they stayed there for a while, taking comfort in each other's presences, before they pulled apart and exchanged a brief kiss.

"I take it we won," she said.

Cloud nodded. "Uh-huh. On this front, anyway. We'll still need to hear back from the ones that went to check out the movement's headquarters and the mako reactor."

As if on cue, there was a roar from overhead and a light WRO dropship shot past before circling about, slowing to a crawl, and entering the Tower's hangar. Tifa watched it for a moment before observing, "That must be them now. If they're coming back, I wouldn't be too worried."

The two of them entered the Tower and found Reeve and Tseng barking orders left and right, telling subordinates where to hold captured SHM, where to get supplies to, to get the elevators working again, to send out patrols to restore order in the city, and so forth. Reeve clutched an empty bottle of water in one hand and a ration bar that he eagerly took bites out of between orders in the other; it was going to take a while, but he was already on the road to complete recovery.

He was working through a mouthful of the bar when he saw Cloud and Tifa. "We did it!" he tried to say, though it came out sounding more like "om dim im!" and he swallowed before repeating himself.

Cloud grinned and patted Reeve on the shoulder. "We did. And I gotta say, I'm really glad you aren't an evil mastermind."

"Me, too. It doesn't sound like a job with many perks."

The rest of the party quickly joined them. Red XIII and Naiad reported complete success in securing the north side of the Tower, while Cid and Barret informed them that what they had termed the "Geriatric Geronimos" had decimated the SHM on the west side. Cloud resisted the urge to roll his eyes; neither of the men were that old yet, after all.

Cloud's phone rang and he picked up, still grinning. "Hello?"

"It's Reno," came a terse voice. "We're stuck on the hangar floor and Yuffie needs medical attention. Someone get the fucking elevators working."

* * *

An hour later, minus Reeve and Tseng, who were still in operational command of the WRO and were elsewhere, and Elena, who was staying with Tseng, the party, plus Reno and Rude, stood outside Yuffie's room in the Tower's hospital wing. The first thing that the doctors had said when they had seen the ninja-girl was that she wasn't going to die, but they hadn't precisely said she was going to be all right, so everyone was understandably worried. 

The tension thickened to palpable levels when the door opened and the man who had been attending to Yuffie stepped out. His expression was relatively jovial, however, and that cleared the air a bit even before he spoke. "I don't know what the hell she was doing," he said, "and I wouldn't advise that she do it again, but she's going to be just fine. Multiple broken bones, internal hemorrhaging, a concussion, the list goes on, but none of it was fatal. We've managed to Cure most of her injuries, and the more severe ones will take just a few more days to heal. You can go in and see her, if you like."

He was nearly knocked down in the stampede to get inside, though Cloud did remember to toss a "thank you" in the man's direction before disappearing into the room. The doctor gave a grunt and moved on to his other patients, of whom there were quite a few.

Inside, Yuffie looked almost serene as she lay, apparently asleep, in the white hospital bed. They had been none too quiet in their entrance, though, so she opened one eye and cracked a half-smile. "Wonderful. The cavalry's here, late as usual."

Reno stepped forward. "Sorry, sugar. It took us a bit to get our asses in gear."

"My knight in shining armor. Don't worry, I forgive you." Her smile widened a bit and Yuffie motioned for Reno to come a bit closer, at which point she grabbed him and pulled him to her for a kiss.

"That's sho shweet," Cid sneered. Yuffie flipped him off without looking, and then Reno pulled back a moment later. "Looks like the doc wasn't lyin', kid. I think yer gonna be just fine."

"Of course I am." Yuffie smiled at the rest of them, but the expression wavered as she looked at the gathering. "Where's Vincent?"

Silence fell and nobody felt like saying anything, so Cloud took it upon himself to inform her. "We're fairly sure he's dead."

Yuffie stared at him. "What the fuck? Are you serious?"

"He is," Reno said, looking pained. "After that monster knocked you out, that Commander Pan guy did some trick – I don't know how, but he liquefied himself and merged with it to try to stop it. The mako reactor was overloading by that point, and Pan's trick seemed like it was gonna work, so I grabbed you and then Rude and I got the hell out of there, told Vincent to come too. We ran our asses off until we judged we were at a safe distance, at which point we turned around and realized Vincent hadn't followed us. We could hear the explosion, and there's no way in hell that he survived. I guess Pan's trick didn't work and he had to stay behind."

Nobody said a word, and Yuffie dropped her gaze to her lap. Presently Cloud heard the sound of her tears hitting the bedsheet, but he kept quiet. When he'd heard the news, he'd wanted to cry, too.

"That idiot," she finally said. "Always trying to do everything by himself." She pulled Reno back to her and rested her head against his stomach. "I told him that. Didn't I tell him that?"

"You did," Reno said. "You did, sugar. It was his own decision."

"T-t-that f-fucking idiot," Yuffie sobbed into Reno's shirt. "That f-fucking idiot."

Nobody had the heart to disagree with her.

* * *

A week passed, and life slowly returned to normal. Funerals were held, the SHM were officially disbanded, and Reeve, the real Reeve, resumed the office of President of the WRO. Tseng, Rude, and Cloud returned to their positions as well, with their authority restored. 

Reeve made a point of having the chip in his brain surgically removed and destroyed. "Just in case," he'd observed humorously to them as he'd dropped the chip into an incinerator. For a world-shaking event, Cait Sith's rebellion had surprisingly little aftermath to speak of.

There was no funeral for Vincent, on Yuffie's insistence, and no casket. "After all the years he spent in a coffin, and being mopey and alone and everything, you think he would want to end up that way again, even in spirit?" she'd argued. "And he wouldn't want any of us to get all depressed over his death. I knew him, I know that's what he'd say!"

She'd gone outside to compose herself after that, and everyone had agreed that she was probably right.

* * *

It was a month later, and Cloud was sitting down with Godo and Makoto in the Wutai Pagoda to discuss the future of Wutai and the WRO. 

"Obviously, what with this entire thing being that Cait Sith's fault, no blame can be placed on Reeve Tuesti," Godo grunted. "If you were sent here to apologize for him, don't. Only a fool would hold him responsible."

Cloud nodded. "I appreciate it, and so does Reeve. He feels responsible for this entire incident, even though it isn't his fault, and he's doing his very best to correct everything. The actual reason he sent me is to propose a formal alliance between Wutai and the WRO, for the benefit of both our governments. He wants to open up unrestricted trade and get a little economic dependency going, so future generations will be disposed to see Wutai in a more indispensable light."

Godo grunted again and ran a hand through his greying hair. "He's thinking about the next generation already, is he? None of us are that old yet."

"Maybe not, but after a crisis like this I think one's thoughts tend to turn to the next generation. After all, we have to keep the world safe for them." Cloud gave a rare, genuinely enthusiastic smile as his own thoughts turned to Tifa's declaration of two weeks ago that she would like to have a child. _There's been enough death and depression lately, I think we ought to turn the trend around. Don't you?_

"An alliance sounds reasonable, as well as desirable. You concur, Commander Makoto?"

Makoto nodded. "Absolutely. I would even go so far as to say that, in the future, an alliance will be vital. Why not start now?"

"In that case," Cloud said, "I'm due back in Edge the day after tomorrow, so I won't be able to stay to negotiate all the terms of the alliance. On that note, let me introduce you to the WRO's official representative to the sovereign nation-state of Wutai."

He motioned for the attendant at the door to open it. She did, sliding it open to reveal a familiar face looking very uncomfortable in a neatly pressed suit.

Godo's exclamation of surprise could be heard from several floors below.

* * *

That evening, Cloud and Reno arrived back at Yuffie's house to find her waiting for them with a bottle of Wutainese honey-bourbon and three glasses with ice. "How was my big boy's first day at work?" she asked only half-ironically. 

Reno rolled his eyes and immediately started freeing his neck from the iron vise of his suit's collar and tie. "Just fine. Your old man had a heart attack at seeing me again and had to be rushed to the hospital, but otherwise just fine."

"Dad's not that old yet. Don't bullshit me, sugar."

"Yes, dear."

Cloud sat back and nursed his drink until Reno returned in vastly more comfortable evening wear and Yuffie stopped needling the ex-Turk. He looked at the silver end of Reno's leg and observed, "You've gotten used to it, I see."

Reno grinned. "Yeah. I don't ever bother to take it off anymore, actually. It's a real improvement over using a cane all the time. If I could go back in time and tell myself 'stop being a little whiny pansy about it and get the operation!' I would."

"_I _don't think you're a whiny pansy," Yuffie admonished him. "There wasn't any real need for it before. And all's well that ends well, after all."

"Yeah. You're right." Reno took another sip of his drink and sighed. "This brings back some memories. Makoto oughta be here."

"He has responsibilities," Yuffie said dismissively. "And so do you, now, but they're not big ones and I can still keep you. So everything is dandy."

Cloud smiled and tipped back the last of his drink. "I'm glad to see the both of you are settled again."

"Yeah," Reno agreed, "well, Yuffie said to me a couple weeks back, 'We can't let this weigh us down. We need to just get on with our goddamn lives like he would have wanted us to, and do the best we can with them.' I think it was the deepest thing she's ever said."

Yuffie, for once, didn't object, but simply gazed thoughtfully into the distance. "That really is what I think, too. I'm still sad, and I will be for a while, but I know Vincent wouldn't want me to be that way.

"A while ago, he told me something really important. 'You know who you are. You're the Great Ninja Yuffie. Don't let the fact that you failed or that you were wrong change that. Deal with the consequences and be who you want to be – and be with who you want to be with. That's what's important. If anyone tells you you're wrong, that's just their interpretation; in the end, it's your decisions and your life, after all.' I remember it exactly, because he was so goddamn right. We can do whatever we want to do, including being happy with ourselves and our lives, as long as we have the will to do it. That's what makes us who we are. If he could do that, and it was so fucking hard for him, I have no excuse not to."

Cloud nodded and got to his feet. "I'm glad to hear you say that. I'm sure that's what he would have wanted, too."

"You leaving?" Reno asked. "We're going to have a night out on the town, you'd be welcome."

"I really do need to go. My transport is fast, but it'll still take tonight and all of tomorrow to get me back to Edge, and they need me there. Reeve is looking at opening relations with Cosmo Canyon, too, and he wants to send me with whatever ambassador he selects to do the job. You two take care."

"That we will," Yuffie said. "We'll see you for the reunion next year, right, Cloud?"

Cloud hesitated at the door, thinking about it. "I haven't been in five years. Why would you expect me to break with tradition?"

"Vinnie broke with his tradition of being an angsty loner at the end, didn't he? This should be easy as pie for you."

She had a point. Cloud shrugged and made his way out. "Then I'll see you there, too," he called over his shoulder.

The front door closed, and Reno and Yuffie exchanged a look. Yuffie grinned at Reno and said, "Pay up."

Reno mumbled something under his breath and pulled out a fifty-gil note. "Son of a bitch. Couldn't keep being antisocial."

"I told you he'd come around. If there's one thing that Vincent showed us, it's that it's not impossible for anybody."

Reno heaved a sigh and looked at the ceiling. "Right. Lot of fucking luck that is. Thanks a lot, Vincent Valentine."

* * *

Cloud brought the Fenrir to a stop next to the sleek, black car that was parked on a ridge overlooking Wutai. He could barely see Yuffie's house from here, though he knew that the car's driver would have no such trouble. 

There was a rail along the ridge to keep cars from careening off of it in case there was an accident, and on this particular night there was a figure leaning on the rail. From behind, nobody would have recognized him; he wore a dark, Turk-issue suit, his normally unruly black hair had been cut to shoulder-length and pulled back into a ponytail, and all he wore on his hands were leather gloves. The only odd thing about him was that he was wearing sunglasses, despite the fact that it was now dark outside.

The Fenrir's engine died down and Cloud dismounted, walking over to the figure. He followed the man's gaze straight to Yuffie's house in the distance. "Are you sure about this?" he asked. "I mean… Cutting off all contact? Becoming just another member of my special forces division of the WRO? It'll be an entirely new life. You're sure?"

The man gave Cloud a sidelong glance and removed his glasses, revealing ruby-red eyes that glittered in the twilight and reflected the lights of the city.

"I'm sure," Vincent said.

"You haven't really told me why."

Vincent returned to staring at Yuffie's house and gathered his thoughts for a bit before replying. "The WRO lab's analysts told me some interesting things. I was in the Lifestream long enough for it to wash me up on the shore of the Central Continent. All that mako exposure reacted strangely with the modifications that Hojo made to me, years ago. It was like my having Chaos as part of my being had brought my system to a standstill, and it took a major mutagenic shock to start me up again. I'm no longer immortal. My body still never will be entirely human, but for all intents and purposes I am one again. I'll age and live out my life and then die. I want to use my new life to do something significant."

"I mean you haven't told me why you don't want anyone else, especially Yuffie, to know," Cloud said, somewhat testily. "She may not show it, and she's doing her best to get through it, but she's still grieving."

"I hate to see her in pain, but it will pass and she will eventually let me go," Vincent said. "Besides, if I was alive again… It would just raise questions that she wouldn't want to answer. It's better this way. Now there's no more 'what ifs' or 'could have beens.' That's what's important."

"You're sure you're not just doing this as an easy way out of her life?" Cloud pressed him. "You're sure your motives aren't entirely selfish?"

Vincent looked at him, and Cloud saw genuine anger flash through the man's eyes. "I love her."

Cloud drew back a pace and then nodded. "I'm sorry."

"Forget it." Vincent put his sunglasses back on and said, "Isn't it time we were heading out, Mr. Strife? You're due back in Edge day after tomorrow, after all."

With a little effort, Cloud collected himself and nodded. "You're absolutely right, Mr. Ruby. We'll head to the airship now; the President wouldn't like it if we were late."

He headed back over to the Fenrir, started it up, and called, "I'll meet you there. You have my luggage in the trunk, after all. Don't take too long."

Vincent watched his old friend disappear down the road and took one last look at Yuffie's house. He felt an unfamiliar pang and realized there were tears in his eyes.

"Goodbye," he said to the empty twilight air. He got back in the car, swiped at his eyes, and headed after Cloud, his future lying ahead of him.

* * *

It was a chill day in December when the two men in suits knocked on Yuffie's door. 

"I'm coming!" she called. Obviously she wasn't as limber as she used to be, or as fast… or as _young_… but she still made it to the door in what she considered to be record time. She opened it and was confronted by the unfamiliar, sunglasses-wearing faces of two men she didn't know. "And you are?"

"We're representatives of the WRO Special Services Division," the first one said. "Ms. Kisaragi, we have been sent to inform you that you are listed as a beneficiary in the will of one of our recently-deceased members."

Yuffie frowned and realized the second one was holding a small box, about the size of her torso. "Really? The only person I know in the SSD is Cloud, and I'm pretty sure that he's not dead."

Both the men bristled at the idea that Cloud Strife, still the most capable and active member of the SSD even in his fifties, could possibly be dead. "No, ma'am, he is not. Do you know a Mr. Phoenix Ruby?"

Yuffie shook her head. "I've never even heard of him. Why would I be listed in his will?"

Reno, who was sitting in the living room working on a crossword puzzle, lazily called over his shoulder, "This better not be an old boyfriend of yours, Yuffie!"

"Shut up!" she called back at him, fighting the urge to stick out her tongue. "I'm sorry, boys, I don't know any Phoenix Ruby. You're sure there isn't a mistake?"

"Absolutely sure, ma'am. You're listed on there very specifically. 'Yuffie Kisaragi, Queen and Single White Rose of Wutai.'"

Yuffie colored a bit. "The whole 'queen' thing is just because my father's passed away. Makoto's really in charge."

"We know, ma'am. Still, you _are _listed in the late Mr. Ruby's will. I think you should go ahead and see what he had to give you that was so important." The second suit extended the box to her, and she took it without protest, thinking to just get the idiots off of her doorstep. "Have a nice day."

"You too," she said before shutting the door in their faces.

"Dumbasses," Reno drawled. "Phoenix Ruby, though? I think I remember him."

Yuffie looked at him as she started getting into the box. "Really?"

"Yeah. I remember seeing his name in the papers a few times, and Rude mentioned him to me at one point. Leader of an SSD squad, did a lot of good and saved a lot of lives during his career." Reno put down the paper he was working on and switched to a different one, the _Edge Daily_. "Look, here's an article on his death."

Yuffie took the paper from Reno and scanned the article. There was no picture and the piece was short; it said that a celebrated SSD officer had fallen in the line of duty and that he would be sorely missed and so forth. There were no details or anything particularly interesting, and Yuffie put the paper down with a snort. "Worthless." She attacked the box with renewed vigor.

Finally the damned thing yielded and Yuffie tore it open.

At first, she didn't know what to think. All there was inside was a dusty, tattered article of clothing that clearly hadn't seen the sun in years. Yuffie pulled it out of the box and stood up to let it hang to its full length and realized that it was a cloak, a cloak of a very familiar color.

Reno looked at it. "What the… Sugar, is that – ?"

Yuffie half-sat, half-collapsed on the couch behind her. "Uh-huh," she murmured. "It is." She cradled it against herself and gave a small sigh that could have been happy or sad. "It is."

**The Red Cloak  
End**


End file.
